


The Fuck-Ups

by Strummer_Pinks



Category: David Bowie (Musician), Doctor Who, Oasis (Band), Once Upon a Time (TV), The Clash, Trainspotting Series - Irvine Welsh
Genre: Major Character Injury, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Depression, Sex, Sex Drugs and Rock and Roll, trigger warning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-01 04:07:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 33
Words: 111,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16277489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Strummer_Pinks/pseuds/Strummer_Pinks
Summary: Once upon a time there was a rock band that wanted to change the world... *This is the story of "the Fuck-Ups” and mostly of Ionee Israls, guitarist, songwriter, single mom, punk survivor... and according to at least one ex-bandmate, potential murderer.*(Now with music video endnotes!)





	1. VOLUME ONE:  PARKLIFE Ionee:  Parklife

**Author's Note:**

> XXX  
> 

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> -So what’re your plans for the next album?
> 
> -Too soon to say exactly, but just between us, we’re planning to change the world.
> 
> -The F-ups, Interview with NME, March 2003
> 
> XXXXX

BOOK 1:

PARKLIFE  
February 2013

 

 

IONEE ISRALS  
(London, UK)

1\. PARKLIFE

I woke to the obnoxious sound of the kitchen timer beeping on my dresser. It’s what I use as an alarm clock since I broke my original one knocking it off the nightstand. Kitchen timer works a treat though. Jams once tried to show me how to do it with my cell phone, but fuck it, this is so much simpler.  
I like straightforward, single-function machines. You put too many features on a thing and it gets in a muddle. People’re like that too, give them too many jobs and something’s bound to get lost in the shuffle.

  
Running a shop I have lots of jobs to do all at once, even a place small as mine. Remember to stock the shelves, do inventory, check on how much stuff’s been nicked over the weekend, pay rent, attend to e-mails and then there’s meetings of the shop owner’s council, go talk about things like cleaning schedules and bin management, and blah blah blah. It’s all bollocks, you ask me. Too early in the morning to fucking bovver, but Ocean has to be up for school, so nothing for it.  
Too bad you feel like you’re a million years old some days. Being the grown-up responsible one around here seriously blows sometimes. Dragging yourself out of bed, when you couldn’t sleep half the night. Hellooooo Sunshine. I rub my hand over my face and take a peek at the big mirror across from the bed. Good morning stitched up eyebrow, marks of age, gut expansion, careless disregard of healthy food and exercise, body trauma and unsuccessful ankle surgery. Hello is it me you’re looking for? Resplendent in a black Rancid T-shirt, (the band, not the smell, give us some credit), and checkered boxers like the outside of a Specials album. Anyone listen to ska anymore round ‘ere? Fuckit, I still do.

  
May be time to re-dye my hair. I’m thinking streaks of purple, pink or blue. How does someone 37 years old have this many gray hairs?  
So, on to why I have a mirror across from the bed. The mirror thing started back when me and Sy was still together. Back then it was nothing to do with watching ourselves get up in the morning and everything to do with watching our reflections as we did something else. What can I say? I’ve always liked to watch. What’s the point of living if you don’t take a minute to stop and really take it all in, observe the show? See nature’s act in all it’s multifarious variety, sample every form of it, sex’s a thing of beauty, innit? So even with Sy gone I kept the mirror.

  
When Jams’s in the flat I liked to watch him in the reflection, sleeping there in my bed, stripped down to his pants, so beautiful and unguarded, arms completely nude. I’d make love to him in my mind all ova the house. Even in sleep you can see his mind’s not a quiet one. He used to talk quite a bit and sweat through the duvet on his side in the winter. There were a few times he dreamed and screamed out, like real terror screams, so loud I couldn’t believe Ocean didn’t wake up in the next room. Those times I held him in my arms, like I’d once held Ocean when she was tiny and stroked him, like he’d never let me do while he was proper awake in the light of day. Even when he got doughy from the meds, he still had great muscles. I used to put my fingers like so along his shoulder blades, scratching up and down and he’d just go all purry like a housecat. Other times he’d let me massage him, circles with my fingers, bringing him back to reality after nightmares, or as much reality as was tolerable for him. For the most part I never tried to pry. I just loved him. Jams’s always been such a easy guy to love.

  
And now it’s been ages since I had anyone else in my bed, just left looking at my morning reflection, trying to picture it like it was. I’m telling you back then, when the band was good, I was one stone cold fox. No joke, even City had nothing on me and if I hadn’ta been with Sy, I could’ve pulled like no tomorrow. As it was, I only had eyes for my boy Sy. It was mad, balls to the walls, lose yourself to the feeling kind of love, me n’ him…back before everything went to shit.

  
At least having Jams here, platonically or whatever, was nice. Now the bed is cold, possibly cause it’s drafty and Ocean took the only draft excluder, but let’s be poetic and say it’s from me being alone. On the plus side Jams being gone allows me to starfish as much as I want. That’s what he used to call it when I’d go all spread-eagled on the bed in my sleep, taking up all the available bed space, pushing him off to the edge. Still, complain as he did, he kept on sleeping here, so it couldn’t have been all that bad, innit?

  
The person with just one job—I want to be like that again, just one or two jobs max. That’s real life versus being on the road for you. In the band it’s straightforward-- like you each have your own role to play and it’s not hard to know what to do.

  
Here’s how it was in our band, the Fuck-Ups:  
We had City, the drummer off her head with drink, speed, E and God knows what else, not that it matters because the men in the audience’re only noticing that she’s wearing nothing but black lace knickers and some kind of random corset on behind that drum kit. If one of her tits busts outta that corset thing as she whales on the hi-hat tonight I owe Jams a gin and tonic. Of course I’m scamming him, knowing she tapes ‘em down.

  
Sy Gupta-Singh my boyfriend, Indian, but born here, our lead singer, the man with the near-Freddie Mercury range and beautiful, cor! Like a young Paul Simonson from the Clash, but MORE, with those waves of silky black hair, dark eyelashes to die for and looking utterly smexy in his studded leather vest. Over half the crowd is dying to get into his pants and the other half are boring straight dudes pathetically oblivious to my boy’s sheer charisma.

  
Then there’s Jams, my mad, soulful artist. The man is given to fits of inspiration, with a voice as deep as Johnny Cash, okay maybe not quite as deep, but on its way there thanks to all the fags he smoked—nah, not those kind of fags, getcher mind outta the gutter. Not a particularly good bass player, but he had other fine qualities. He was the only one I’d willingly collaborate with on songs, mostly ‘cause his ideas weren’t complete shit and could go absolutely fucking mental on stage. A good guy to have in your corner, a real mate.

  
Then there’s me, Ionee Israls.

  
That’s two I’s and fuck no, I said, I won’t change my name. If Art Fucking Garfunkel can go platinum and Keith Levene’s good enough for P.I.L., I think I can keep my Jewy moniker, thanks ever so much recording label cunts.

  
I’m the mastermind behind the curtain, me, lead guitarist and head songwriter, screamer of anthems to disturb the sleeping public, awaken their consciousness, open up their closed-off, shut-in sloth-ridden minds Joe Strummer-style. Come out of the cupboards yah boys and girls! Make ‘em listen, yeahr? Okay, so I was a bit of pretentious, art school prick, so what? At least you got a side helping of consciousness raising with your entertainment when you came to hear us. Maybe it’s outta fashion to say we wanted to change the world, but we did, or at least a tiny bit of it. Somebody puts a mike in your face and gives you a chance to speak to more’n your mates and family and you got to take advantage, yeahr? You ask me, I’ll tell you, best do it NOW, know before your number is up and your fleeting chance is gone, ‘cause you nevah know.

  
Fuck me, it was a trip to get up on stage, play the guitar and stir up the crowd, spraying them with beer and candied cherries stolen from the bar. You could clock me any day of the week in my crazy kit like some WWII era spiv in probably-stolen clothes bought for a fiver off the wide boys plying their trade by the wall in Brick Lane, in the infinite boot sale that was Saturday outside Spitalfields market.

  
That was my one and only job—write songs, play guitar, bust everyone’s ass in the studio, sing on the chorus, jesterify, electrify the crowd and alert the masses to their coming takeover by corporate America. And it suited me to a T like that second hand spiv suit I wore to the gigs. (Seriously, it fit like a glove, even over my breasts, that fucking three piece spiv suit-- God I loved that thing!).

  
But here’s the secret to why I’m so good at it-- I’m complete shit at everything else.

And now everything else is all I got left.

Oh, I can still play guitar and even with the pin in my hand, I’m pretty sure I sound just as good- fuck, probably even better’n I did on “In the Lock-Up” (my title by the way. City claiming it’s hers? Fucking bollocks, that is), and that was our best record. Maybe my voice is a bit shot from too much shouting at crowds, but it was never great to begin with. It didn’t have to be if you were in some type of punk or folk though, one of the reasons I got into it, I guess.

Thing is, I don’t look or move like I used to back in the day when I had so much energy I bounced around the stage like a rubber ball gone bonkers, making everyone think I was coked up, even though I wasn’t, urging the punters to come up there with me and fight it out if they dared, wanting it all to be as dangerous as possible. Even if I’d kept in shape-- and let’s face it, they care more about that if you’re a girl, somehow it’s okay for all the blokes to look like dog’s breakfast warmed over-- the car crash did a serious number on me. The resulting damage completely not helped, might I add, by me stupidly snapping some of the metal thingies holding my ankle together while trying to pick a fight with Jams, of all people. They operated again, but it didn’t take. That was a year and a half ago and I still can’t walk great. I mean I seen pensioners with their cheques make it to Ladbroke’s faster. Fucking depressing that, but it is wot it is.

  
I do still play the occasional back up session though, and that’s always a pleasure. It’s brilliant going out and shooting the shit with other musicians. I played on a few of Amy Winehouse’s live tracks way back when she used to hang out in the Lock and do concerts at the Roundhouse. There’s a graffitti picture of her on the back of one of the stalls in the Inverness Market here that I walk by every morning on me way to work, coming up from Camdentown station. Too much talent gone out of this world too fast and it’s so sad. Just left with the dregs like me now. Ah fuck it, that’s just too morbid. Even for someone who listens to the Smiths and REM for pleasure.

  
Anyway, there’s loads of studios right near my shop in the Stables Market in Camdentown. Sometimes I’ll just nip off for the afternoon to record and then up to Proud Camden for a drink with the rest of the musicians after, beneath the benevolent gaze of 1970s era titans in pictures by Mick Rock. I always try to make sure to sit under the one of David Bowie in full Ziggy Stardust mode. He’s always been my favourite, Ocean’s too. He’s the only thing we seem to agree on anymore, David Bowie.

It’s nice to pretend I’m part of that scene again, even just for a bit. I’m grateful to still be here, to be honest. Things could be so much worse, have been so much worse. You remind yourself of that and maybe the day won’t be complete rubbish.

I like having the shop (most of the time) and I love the Stables and Camden Market, have done since I were a kid. The whole place used to be a horse hospital and stabling area before any of us was born, but since been converted into this rabbit warren of artsy-punky sort of marketplace stalls and hole-in-the wall shops selling funky used clothes, fashion knockoffs from China, T-Shirts with Banksy pics on them, used CDs, books, hair accessories, Gothic Lolita gear, Cyberdog glow-in-the-dark raver shit, rainbow coloured leg warmers, top hats, fingerless striped gloves, rapper shades like Venetian blinds all in screaming neon colours and food from a billion different countries all in one place.

What can I say? I like the stimulation and this place always felt like home, even when I didn’t hang out here 24/7.

My shop in the market, F.U. in tribute to my former band, sells used CD’s, and some few signed memorobilia, stuck up high on the wall where the scum can’t nick it, band T-shirts and these posters made of metal of Iggy Pop, the Jam, the Kinks, wotever’s your fancy. It’s kind of a shame about the CD’s, innit? People download everything now, of course, but I keep the used stuff anyway and try to get rid of it at a decent price. Sometimes you’ll get tourists wanting to buy their copies of Rattus Norvegicus, London Calling or wotever right next to the Electric Ballroom where the real bands used to play, across the road from where the albums were recorded from an actual former fixture of the scene herself, meaning yours truly.

Least that’s what I pretend. Usually the only people who know my work or recognize me from back then are other session musicians. A few even come over to tell me how much one of our albums inspired them to start playing or how they came to the see us when we played the side stage at Glastonbury or the Isle of Man festival back before they were these massively expensive super festivals, back when our mates fought we were total sell outs just playing there.  
The band—the only one that mattered (other than the Clash of course who coined the phrase)—of the handful of bands I been in-- the only one people still talk about is the Fuck-Ups. The name alone got us attention. We got barred from plenty of places we might otherwise have been able to gig at, but Jams of course insisted—made it a point of his remaining with the band only if we used that name. We needed a bass player and Jams was in charge of the whole look and feel of the group so we agreed. Fuck-Ups it was. Little did we realize how accurate the title was going to be, as fucking up our chances was the one thing we excelled at.  
We never had a hit record or top number one, even locally and I still think it’s ‘cause of the name. It was a big thing for people. Stupid that. I never got why. I mean it’s just words, innit? People who interviewed us always made such a great palaver about it and it’s all really just one kind of people trying to keep the other kind down, ‘cause they use the wrong words or talk the wrong way. People criticize you for being too posh, people dis you for being too street. Everybody so defensive of their own precious club. It’s all the same fooking thing, just saying “you stay in your little box and I’ll stay in mine.” Yes you, come live in this little tiny fooking box I’ve prepared for you because you’re a woman or a man or a punk, or a posh git or wotever. I mean, fuck that, cause of more wars than anything, that. Boxifying. People boxifying each other. Shite’s straight out of order, that.

The harm is in accepting all the bullshit you’re fed, just plodding along saying “it’s always been that way, so it must be right” nobody bovering to use their own brain or look beyond whatever news they’re twittering on about on the internet. Let someone else tell you what you should think’s important. That’s the most harmful state of mind, right there. Some kid nicking from the pound shop versus your Big Investment Banker, skimming off pensioners’ savings to buy a holiday home in Corfu —who gets the knighthood and the million pound bonus and who gets a few weeks at her majesty’s pleasure? We made our kind of music, because we got to get people to wake up to this shite, not let the media fob us off with today’s twattish royal infant, chosen winner of celebrity sperm lotto 2013 or Celebrity Big Brother or wotever terrorist threat that’s sending people round the bend, redtops headlines all screaming PAY ATTENTION and FREAK OUT. Seriously? Don’t anyone else see it’s all equally bloody irrelevant to your daily life.

There are literally way more people dying from falling down stairs, (and may I just say fuck British stairs, because they are always too many of them and they’re always too bloody uneven) and hanging around too long in A and E because the NHS don’t have the money to hire more doctors, than ever died of terrorism here, which means the rest’s just bread and circuses innit? Keep the plebes distracted, whilst you privatize the post. Give me fiction fine, but don’t give me fiction dressed up as truth. That shit’s out of ordah.

But it’s no matter thinking cause my second alarm’s beeping now and I’m late for the little one. Time to get schooled. Forget all that independent thought muck and join the daily grind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter is named after the Blur song "Parklife"  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSuHrTfcikU


	2. Cammy: the Blank Generation

CAMMY HALES  
(Toronto, Canada)

2\. THE BLANK GENERATION

T’rawno man, 6.5 million people here and no one outside Canada or Upstate New York ever heard of us til Gawker did that story about our crack smoking mayor and some random show in Taiwan made an animation about it that went viral on the internet. Yup, that’s how you get famous in the twenty-first century kids, live and learn. I mean someone says Toronto and what picture comes to mind? It’s just a big fucking blank isn’t it?

  
It doesn’t matter that I was born here, I’ve been trying to ditch this place for ages. Everybody thinks, oh Canada, it’s this fantastic liberal utopia where everybody is all polite and peaceful. We’re supposed to be the nice ones, not like those awful, horrible, rude Americans to the south with all their guns and racism, country music and evangelical bullshit. Even if you hate them, you can still like us. We don’t go around making war on other countries for oil. We’re like nicer, more PC Americans! We may be inferior in population numbers, but we’re morally superior. Visit Canada! Stay in Niagara Falls, stare at water falling off a cliff, gamble and drink 6% beer ‘til you puke and soak in the ambiance! Come on, you know you want to. Isn’t it like everyone says? Aren’t we just so fucking polite?  
Yeah, and hypocritical and smug as fucking shit.

  
Best place to live in the world? Yeah maybe, if you’re a health care administrator between the ages of 40 and 65 and bought your home in early 1980s before and the real estate went crazy, but if you’re young and creative it’s dead ends all over the place. You’re surplus, and expendable and they make sure you know it. This is not the city to be a musician or a teacher in and unfortunately for me, I happen to be both.  
So what about that famous politeness, you ask?

  
Lemme tell you something, it’s not a myth, but people confuse politeness with friendliness. You can be perfectly, distantly polite, without ever being welcoming and friendly. That’s the big secret; that icy surface politeness with no genuine warmth behind it, the closed circle that never opens. People here learn to be professionally courteous, to say please and thank you and stand in line without pushing and they’re taught to make that cool, polite smile, you know the one that never quite reaches the eyes, always holding the greater part of their humanity back, that missing offer of contact and warmth and welcome, that leaves you groping about for some meaningful human connection, all conversational nets thrown out drawn back in empty. That’s what people who only just visit the city never really pick up on and maybe that’s why I still feel like a stranger here, even after so many years.  
I say be rude to my face if you like, but just acknowledge my fucking existence, okay? Let me be somebody to you at least, even if it’s somebody you hate. Just not looked over, never invisible, okay?

  
But no one originally from here is ever looking for a friend. Meet someone new? God forbid. You make your friends at whatever Korean church or Portuguese-Catholic nursery or Jewish day school or Tamil afterschool club your parents send you to and you stick with your group for life. Eighty years after most of my people immigrated here, it’s still all “play it SAFE, stick to your own kind, stranger-danger. Don’t take a risk, don’t disturb the status quo, don’t offend, don’t call attention to yourself, don’t wonder why things are the way they are ‘cause it’s the only way they could ever be, eyes down on the bus and try not to stand out.”  
Look, I’m not saying they’re the worst values to have. Better than “let’s fight for some shitty piece of real estate in the middle of the desert until everyone on both sides is dead,” or “religion A is better than religion B and therefore all adherents of religion B must die!” I mean that’s outright caveman shit that just leads to a cycle of violence, misery and monochromatic fashion. Other than hockey, people here aren’t habitually violent and I like that.  
But there’s such a thing as playing it too safe. So many of us came to this country fleeing persecution to arrive in this peaceful place, looking to relax, at last. But that’s never the end of it. People get used to running, to suspicion, to fear and the next thing ya know they’re recreating the design of the ghetto around themselves even when the cage itself is gone. I guess if that’s all you’ve known up til then, maybe you can’t get comfortable without at least some semblance of the cage around you. It’s what feels safe. And if you were alpha male dog of the pack confined in the original cage you’re probably significantly invested in your underlings, especially the female ones, never realizing the full potential of their freedom—that now that they don’t need you for protection, they’re free to run off and do whatever the fuck they want.

  
There’s lots of things I don’t understand about the habits of other people, like why they watch sports or think it’s cool to use skulls as a decorations—but I’ve never understood how you can’t be curious about other people, other ways of doing things.

  
Like what’s up with everyone trying to create this homogenous societies? I’m sorry, but a world where everyone you ever meet is white or Jewish or Japanese or whatever and everyone sorts themselves into these convenient fucking categories to make everything neat and tidy—I mean what’s the appeal? Seriously, I don’t get it. Like suck all the excitement and adventure out of existence why don’t you? People getting “overly” passionate about weird shit and people being mixed up and wearing things that don’t match and getting offended—it’s not always bad. So many things start with being brave enough to take a chance on something; something no one around you has ever done before, being into something you like just because you like it, not because it’s got the coolness seal of approval from Vogue or whatever. Thinking you’ll succeed in doing something different just because you’re you.

  
Me, I’m sick to death of people telling me to “be realistic,” “manage your expectations,” trying to make me dream small. Creativity is what I have that’s special, the thing I can do that no one else can. Being here, in this place where you can get a good education, excellent training, but can’t hope to make a living-- in this place with no space for artists or dreamers to survive? I don’t want to fucking “adapt to circumstances.” Fuck that, let circumstances adapt to ME for a change-- if I can’t find some way of making money off what I love and what I’m really good at, long term, I know I’m just going to end up like the rest of my old friends; another bitter hipster, living at home, working part-time at Wal-Mart without dental benefits.

  
No one gets famous here. Talented artists, actors, writers, musicians, and everyone’s just sitting there in the waiting forever, dreaming of a ticket to somewhere with an actual music, publishing or entertainment industry, where they won’t have to struggle just to hang onto a shitty basement apartment. We all know it’s hard to make it in this business anywhere, but at least other places have a business.

  
All I know is, I wish we’d all just stop pretending we’re as great as everyone thinks we are. Everyone going “at least we’re better than the States,” which just means “shut up and put up, ‘cause things could be worse.” But just because it could be worse, means we shouldn’t try to make it better? Because things have got to be better than this, this acceptance of people just being expendable, with no one shy to make sure you know it.

  
But you ask people and they’re all like, “WHAT you don’t like it HERE?” Like they can’t fucking believe it. I mean, why, like why in the world would you ever, ever, want to ever live anywhere else, but this perfect paradise?

  
I remember how it was when I came here from LA. It was supposed to be like coming home and for Mum and Dad, at least it was. At first I really dug it—how neat it was to walk around and night with other people, all the awesome parks everywhere and libraries all over the place. Or maybe the city was just cooler then, before the glass condo towers invaded downtown overnight like the Borg. When’d things change? Maybe it was that weird December night, when Grams, my Dad’s mum locked herself out of her house in Oakville by mistake and couldn’t get back in. She was found a few blocks away near the closed down Ford Windstar plant where she used to work. Dead from exposure. Just think about that-- she died, just from being outside, on a regular winter night, nothing special, not a hurricane or alone on some empty tundra next door to the Arctic Circle, but in the middle of a suburban city with buses and traffic lights and “luxury “condos and all the rest of that shit all around. And nobody noticed or stopped because y’know who’d want to be impolite? And because it was the suburbs, nobody was walking around anyway. Just another regular January night, nothing special temperature wise. I mean, what the fuck?

  
Afterward there were days, I felt like I was outside a ship, out in the vacuum of space, floating around my tin can, just tethered to life by this narrow little cord, and there was a portal between the black nothingness of outer space and the interior of the ship and the door in front of me was irising in, closing up, and I had to get to it, through that small hole, back into the breathable air, back where the other astronauts were or I’d be lost to void forever.

  
It was wrong, all of it. I mean I shouldn’t have been in such desperate straights, right? My Mum and Dad were a doctor and a diplomat, and they lived in a nice safe neighbrourhood-- Forest Hill—we had a nice house. It had four bedrooms and a two car garage. I was educated, well-educated and always did well in school. Didn’t do drugs, not even cigarettes or pot, never joined a gang, won the Kiwanis festival for piano two years in a row. That should’ve meant something, right? I should’ve been able to get a normal job, make normal money, have a normal mood and attitude about things.

  
And for all my complaining about this city— I’m not stupid-- I know it isn’t completely the city’s fault, that I wasted my potential—it’s ME. I’m the wrench in my own mind here, my own obstacle to success, my own “spanner in the works” as Ionee would say. The city just elaborated on it. All the lack of opportunity and indifference. It just sucks you dry after a while, I guess. If you have friends and someone to love, it can be all right, but my group was gone now. I love my family, but they aren’t a boyfriend or a group of friends. They’re not my peers and they don’t really understand, not like Mitch did and Mitch is gone now. And _____ is really gone. Like gone as in dead, I mean. That was the worst, worse than my grandma because I really sort of thought I could save him. And now everyone else we hung out with back when things were good keep their distance, especially after my own little meltdown.

  
Fuck’em I say. Don’t need ‘em. What I need is a job, a way to make money. I need friends, too, better friends, my own friends, not Mitch’s, people my age, not his.  
I never wanted to be so down on this city. You havta understand, I wanted to love this place, not hate it. This frustrated bitter person, hating everything in sight, this isn’t me.

  
“Maybe if I was in a band,” I told Ionee, “I would feel different. I want to play music with other people. It’s like working in a vacuum here. I’ve never even been in a band before, other than Rock Band for the X-box.”

  
“You did choir at school—“

  
“Not the same.”

  
“That classical stuff, the Kiwanis and that.”

  
“Screw piano. I’m gonna take guitar lessons. There’s gotta be someplace—on Queen Street maybe…”

  
“What’s Queen Street like these days?”

  
“How can I describe it? Gentrified.”

  
That word covers a multitude of changes. I remember my recent tour of the neighbourhood down there the week before. Those few blocks of Queen Street between Bathurst and University. This was our hang out, this place was cool. Awesome punk and raver clothes I could never afford, electronic music blaring out of grungy 19th century buildings, cheap food and comic books, shops with awesome goth get-ups all crushed velvet, lace corsets and crazy heeled shoes—I loved all that shit, back in the day. In the future, we said, when we’re all rich we’ll get this, that and the other thing. And now all the weird clothes shops were gone, made into shiny chain stores of craptastic blandness.

  
Even the Big Bop’s closed down, morphed into some place for funky condo furniture. Who knew the Bop was hiding all that pretty red brick under that garish purple cover? The glue sniffing squeegee kids that used to hangout on the corner are gone, too. But gone where?

  
The homeless people I saw downtown when I was younger, the ones outside the Bop were mostly teens, hippies, druggies and runaways come down from the sticks for the summer, busking and bumming around the city in the warm weather, cleaning cars and picking up informal outdoor work here and there, doing drugs and going to raves out in the abandoned warehouses and factories by the lake, before they knocked them down and converted them to condos.

  
The people on the streets don’t look like punky kids with facial piercings anymore. It’s not about getting high under the Gardiner Expressway from June to September and back home to school in the fall anymore. Maybe it’s just me, hanging around Starbucks because I’ve got no work to go to, but everyone here seems so much worse for wear, more hardcore and junky-ified somehow. Some of them are obviously severely mentally ill and in conditions of filth and stench no sane human being could possibly tolerate. I’m not the cleanest person, but to see human beings in such a state literally makes my skin crawl.

  
People find shelter where they can. In the freezing winter weather the odors around the ATM machine lobbies gag you before you even punch in your PIN number. These people should be in hospitals, being looked after, not ticketed and dragged off by the cops.

  
People in the England still think Canada is this place you go if you can’t hack it in the UK, someplace where even real losers can get a job. Maybe in the 1950s. Not now.

  
“You know there are homeless people in London, too, lots of them,” said Ionee on the phone.

  
“You want to know the day I realized this place was really turning to shit?” I told her. “The day those stupid blue signs popped up in the subway.”

  
“What?”

  
I was subletting this room in the Annex at the time and one day everything was normal and the next day I was in St. Clair West subway and there were these blue signs everywhere. Cheerful bright blue signs with helpful white lettering. And this is what the signs said:

“Thinking of suicide? We can help.”

I froze. That word—the “S” word-- that’s one of my taboo words. Even just writing it here freaks me out and I’m not even saying it out loud. Then there was this hotline thing. Instructions to press the blue buttons on the pay phones in the station to call for free. I remembered how a local paper once tried to get information on how many people died by subway trains that way since its inception, but transit wouldn’t release the info. They think people might not want to take the TTC if they knew. A friend of mine saw it happen once. The rumours are there’ve been at least a couple thousand gone that way since the subway was installed.

  
When the train arrived I gratefully stepped inside to get away from the signs and thought all was well.

“Thinking of suicide?”

Insisted a new sign, slightly smaller than the first, inside the car itself this time, not just a poster on the wall of the tunnel outside. I look away, stared above it, perusing ads for Juicy Fruit and Credit Solutions.

“We can help.”

What-- do they provide people with ropes or maps to the nearest bridge or something? I mean what the fuck? Whoever thought this was a good idea?  
Thinking of suicide?

  
Well I wasn’t before, but I bloody well am now, thanks very much cheerful blue sign! I was actually feeling okay for a moment, before you intruded, forgetting about ______ and what he did to himself, but there you’ve gone and spoiled my fucking mood, reminding me, bringing me back to that fucking day. Yeah, fucking thanks for that! For not letting me forget, not ever, not even for a single stupid afternoon!

  
The phraseology of the signs is odd, too. It calls to mind the other subway posters that crop up here around wintertime advertising “sun destinations” to Cuba or the Caribbean, ones that say things like:

  
“Thinking of the perfect island getaway? Choose Sandals Resort in the Bahamas” over a picture of a light skinned black couple frolicking in the sunshine.  
It was creepy, as if the blue signs were subtly encouraging you to think about it, like those ads that try to get you to buy fabric softener, even if, like me, you don’t see the point.

  
Curiously, those weren’t the only blue signs making the rounds at the time. Another set of almost identical blue signs, only in slightly darker blue began cropping up about a month later. Often I found them situated side by side. These other signs, featuring a slightly different font, on a slightly darker blue background read:

“Thinking of pursuing a career as a CGA? Looking for a degree that can take you anywhere? Certified General Accountants are in demand all across Canada, the US and the world!”

There was a hotline on these signs as well, this time to enroll in certified accountant school.

  
“So those are the choices the subway walls offer,” I explained to Ionee. “Death or Accounting and maybe if you’re extra lucky and save up you get to go to Sandals Resort in the Bahamas for your mandatory two week vacation to run around with ad-friendly light skinned black people. Yay.”

  
“I’m not sure if you’re being intentionally racist or just annoying,” she said. “Anyway, I’m worried about you. They’re just posters.”

  
I thought about my own skills. They didn’t involve anything that remotely resembled what I’d need for a CGA. I couldn’t even add two digit numbers in my head.  
The posters seemed to reach right out at me and grab me by the front of my shirt, telling me I was a useless piece of shit, a disgrace, with no job and no prospects, just a pathetic waste of skin and squandered potential. The city didn’t want me anymore, not unless I could be molded into something it could use. It was trying to deliver a clear message, had been trying for ages, and I just couldn’t take the hint, to see what was right before my eyes.

  
“Let’s be clear here,” the signs seemed to say, “there’s no place in this town for you. Someone with your paltry set of talents, and inability to deal with numbers or get anywhere on time, either has to change and become the kind of person we need, or get lost and let us get back to important business like making money on real estate, stocks and oil.”

  
At first it was possible to ignore the implications, but as time wore on the blue signs continued their onward march towards colonizing the entire TTC. The more I saw them, the more they stuck out in my head, impossible to unsee and ignore. They began appearing on the insides of buses as well until there was no escape from them on any form of public transit.

  
Look, I knew they were there to try to help people, but wouldn’t it have been simpler just to put up a barrier like they had in those new Jubilee Line stations in London? Apparently, the barrier thing had been talked about, but was just too expensive.

  
It’s hard to realize that after working your ass off for years trying to get somewhere, the only thing separating you from the people on the street stinking and freezing to death, is the goodwill of your parents.

  
So that was it then. Either the signs went or I did. As the signs didn’t seem to be going anywhere, I would therefore have to leave.

  
“Now does that sound crazy?” I asked Ionee after I’d explained myself to my satisfaction. “Mum and Dad don’t get it, but—“

  
“No, I don’t think it’s crazy.”

  
“Really?”

  
“Of course, you want to go someplace you can be your own person, where you can make your living as yourself, not someone you’ll never be anyway.”

  
“How’d you know?”

  
“’Cause I felt that way too.”

  
I was better after I hung up with her. How’s she always know what to say to shake me out of my worst moods? Suddenly, I knew I could do it, now that I was stronger, now that the depression had loosen its grip, if only slightly. Somehow I would find my own way. And it would not be one that either of the blue signs offered.

  
Then I saw the ad for the teaching agency in the back of the glossy magazine the otherwise useless Ontario College of Teachers sent me every few months. A teaching agency from England was coming to town to do interviews. They were actively looking for teachers-- teachers to bring to London.

  
My friends in the profession were cynical about the prospect when I told them. They warned me I’d be sent to “bad schools,” in the inner city, places where bad kids set fire to desks and tried to stab the teachers with over-sharpened pencils. As these precise things had already occurred in the T’rawno schools I’d volunteered at, I didn’t see the big problem. At least these London schools would pay me. I mean, here were people that were actually interested in me working for them.  
And they didn’t even know my parents. That in itself was shocking by T’rawno standards. If you know someone with a good job here, you know they’ve gone into their parents’ career. Anyway, I aced the interview and strutted out of that hotel conference room like I’d just won the Nobel Prize. I’d been headhunted! Me! For the first time in ages, I felt a surge of hope animate my being. There was a fire in my belly that even the cold weather couldn’t put out. Soon I’d be where I really belonged, away from here.

  
I’ve only just started to come out of my last depression after ____’s death and that soul killing break up with Mitch. I’m still really blue most of the time and I don’t know how much more rejection I can take.

  
The number one priority is to keep myself from slipping back. I gotta take control of my destiny somehow. I can’t have that shit tearing up my mind again. Now that I’m strong enough to leave, it’s time I went, before I get down again. I feel a little stronger now, a little braver. Now that I know I got no career or friends left to go back to here, I’m willing to lie on the immigration forms. I’ve done enough intake interviews for teaching agencies that I know they won’t take you if you checkmark the depression or mental illness box. Ditto an honest disclosure of the true state of my bank account. To paraphrase King Solomon and the Byrds, there’s a time for honesty and a time for scamming the border agency. I know what time it is now. I can do it. I can break free.  
I’ve got a plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> XXXXX  
> Chapter Title from "the Blank Generation" by Richard Hell and the Voidoids  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr38FooIId0


	3. Ocean: The Very Sad Timelord

OCEAN ISRALS  
(London, UK)

The verySad Time Lord  
by Ocean Israls (aka Ocean Gupta)

NARAyTA: In the basement of the hospital they is kept, like in a refrijrator for dead peepl. This was a queit plas most of the time at night.

But tonite wasn’t like most nights. Tonite one of the drawers went bang bang bang. SUM one inside was trying to get out.

Soon a man came up to the drawer. But he wasn’t dressed like the reglar hospital people. This man had a long brown coat and a suit and on his feet were a pair of Conversation traners. He ran down the hall toward the sownd of the banging metal door. At last he arived at the right one and opend it. he punch in the code. A man came out. He had black hair and brown eyes and brown skin.  
“Sitikantha Ravana Gupta Singh? “said the Doctor.”  
“What took you so long?” Also call me Sy”  
“Here, put these on, said the Doctor and he gives Sy one of his normal cloths.. “  
“I just reenkarnated, said Sy. Wher is me dotter Ocean?”  
“You can’t see her,” said the Doctor. “You need to come with me and go away from the Earth for a bit.  
DAD: “How come?”  
DOCTOR: “Because you broke time lord rules. Ur not seposed to marry with humans and have kids with humans as well you no that.  
DAD: That is rassist agaynst humins. As well, we ain’t be married.  
DOCTOR: Alright, but Still the other time lords be well narked. Lots of agro going down on Galifray rite now yeh?  
“Oh. Sorry, Sy said. I didn’t meen to do nothink.”  
DOCTOR: It’s okay any way they want you to help them fight in the Time Wars.  
SY: I don’t think so,.  
DR: U don’t got no choys. Other wise when they take you back to Galfrey they will have to take your daughter Ocean and ur beeyach Ionee as well.”  
Maybe they will like Gallifrey? ”said Sy.” It is a fun plass.  
The DOCTOR: I don’t think so. Time Lords wont like them or let them play gituars. They won’t give them jobs because they think human music its crap.  
“Oh no!!!!!!!!” said Sy. What will you do if I run away?”  
THE DOCTOR: Nothing, but the other time lords will probably catch you. Best come now.”  
SY: But what will I say to my dotter Ocean? She will think that I haf died and she will be sad and I will be sad if I think she is sad!!!!!!!!!!!!”  
“That is a tuff problem said the Doctor.” “I know! he said. I can fix this!”  
“What?” said Sy.  
“DOCTOR: I am reckording us tarking now. We can put it on USB stick and give to Ocean. She will fly a space ship and come find you some day and know you didnt di.”  
“That is a good idea, said Sy my Dad dad.  
Here, give me the SD card and I will rite her a leter abow tit and put it in this enveelup pe, onvelope said the Doctor.  
“Sure”! said Sy.  
Then the Doctor gave Dad the memory card and wrote the story of how this happned and put it in this onvelope and mailed it to me Mum.

That is how I know what REALLY happned to me Dad and that he is  
not propa ded for real and also he is a time lord. Mum told me I have to wayte til I’m at least 18 to fly my own spaceship or get a TARDIS but when I’m olda I will go find him and tell him I miss him an mum does too and his band is brilyant and togever we will end the time wars and travel around the galaxy and have brilyant aventures 4eva!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YAY!!!!!!!!

THE END!!!!!!!  
OR IS IT??

 

3\. CHANGES

Mum hasn’t come to wake me up yet, so I just lie there in bed thinking how to get out of going to school, knowing any second she’ll come and make me go. I pull the duvet over my head, as if this really helps, like she wouldn’t notice a giant, Ocean-sized lump under the covers, ‘c’mon mate you ain’t fooling no one.  
I used to kinda like school, but now not so much. I miss Mr. Oh. I miss Jams, too, and Zaydie and Bubie who I’ve not seen in AGES and maybe even my Dad, not that I proper remember him.

  
But at school I miss Mr. Oh.

  
Why they have to change teachers? He’s the best teacher I ever had. He even liked my Dr. Who stories. I liked him from the first time I met him. He had a cool name, just like a letter. I was sitting in the back all scared because he was this new teachah at the school and no one knew anything about him. I never had a boy teacher before. The only other guy teacher was Mr. Sturgeon from PE and he liked to yell a lot and made you wait on the football pitch for ages while he explained the stupid rules over and over before ever letting you play and then PE was half done innit?

  
Mr. Oh don’t yell unless we is super noisy. He has black hair and pretty brown eyes and long black eyelashes like Mai Su in my class who is from China. I think maybe he is from China too, or his family is. When he talks he don’t sound foreign though—you’d nevah credit it but he sounds exactly like the Ninth Doctah! The one played by Christopher Eccleston wot had that black leather jacket, y’know? He has a black leather jacket too, Mr. Oh does.

  
Mr. Oh wears brown corduroy jackets and jeans and he told me he’s really from Manchester just like Oasis. None of the other kids knew that, that he was from Manchester or anyfing about Oasis either. He only ever told me he was from there ‘cause I was his favourite, and when I said “oh like Noel Gallagher” he gave me big smiles.

  
Every day he played songs for us on the keyboard he had set up in the class. Each Friday a different kid got to request a different song, any song we wanted as long as it didn’t have curses words in and he’d sing it and play for us and we’d all learn the song and sing along.

  
It was just like when Uncle Jams used to teach me bass and we’d sing together, only Uncle Jams’s voice doesn’t go very loud from him getting hurt in the neck a long time ago.

  
In Mr. Oh’s class we did loads of drama and role playing games and improvisations. I was good at that stuff too. It was way better than all the stupid sums and sight reading practice we had to do the year before with Mrs. Harman. Mr. Oh said he knew those games because he was an actor. He was a teachah AND actor. But he didn’t look like he was on stage like the actors we saw when we did that school journey thing to the Shakespeare Globe. And proper actors from the telly—it’s stupid, but I dunno, I kind of thought like they were a bit magical or someit and supah posh and lived in fancy houses with gates apart from normal people, sort of like the Queen or Prince William. But Mr. Oh, he just look like this ordinary teachah except he had all this shiny black hair down to his shoulders when all the other teacher blokes had short boring hair. He couldn’t be supah posh really, because me en Mum saw him shopping for loo roll down the pound shop.

  
When it came my turn to request a song, we already gone through eight other kids he chose from his special hat. Lemme tell you, yeah-- their song choices? They was proper shit. Justin Beiber, One Direction. Total crap. Or they’d just stand there waffling around not knowing what to ask for ‘cause they didn’t know any proper music and end up saying ‘Mary had a Lickle Lamb.’ It’s so unfair ‘cause I hadta wait for ages and I knew what song I wanted from the start!  
“In the Lock Up” of course.

  
Just in case Mr. Oh didn’t know how it went, I copied the words off the liner notes from Mum’s CD at home on extra paper and stapled it to the back of the worksheet. It took me like a million years to do it, but I didn’t stop til it was all done and down on paper:

The judge he put me in the dock  
Count up me days and watch the clock  
‘Cross the courtroom ticking down  
Time to leave this bloody town  
Renegades, rude boys gather round  
Toss them bastards underground  
Bust up fascists, bury the crown  
Batter ‘em up if they press us down

Down in the lock up!  
Down in the lock up!  
You look up!

Clink clink and toss the key  
But know you bastards won’t bury me  
Cause I’ll always always  
Fight to be free  
From the lock up  
From the lock up  
I’ll look up!

**Awesome guitar bridge here!*****

Coming cross this room try to take ME down?  
But it’s time YOU left this bleeding town  
You wrote us off and put us down  
And stole our gold to make your crown  
Now I dare you filth to come around  
See the revolution rise up on the overground,  
Watch out watch out, yeah you better look down  
Cause we’re coming up from the underground!  
Watch the people rise up from the underground…

 

YAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!

from the lock up  
from the lock up  
Can’t bury me  
Cause I’ll always always  
Fight to be free!

So anyways, that’s the song I wanted Mr. Oh to play. The one single the Fuck-Ups had that cracked the top 100 in the UK for a solid five weeks at number 99! Yeah! That’s when they couldn’t even print the band’s full name on the charts so they had to write “Fups” instead and it got people confused about what album to buy. So I wrote to Mr. Oh on my paper: “In the Lock Up” by the “Fups,” like NME magazine did.

  
All requests had to go in Thursday at the end of class. There was other stuff we had to write on the paper, as well, like why we chose this song and what it makes us think of and blah blah blah. That part took me a long time. I’m not so good at writing. Like I’m good at telling wot my thoughts is out loud and talking and that, but when I hafta write it down it nevah reads like it is in my head and letters get mixed up. It’s frustra’ing. They think I have learning disabilities, which is NOT TRUE, but Mum says we’re still waiting for the school to do the test, which is good because no fucking way I’m taking it, because wot if it says I’m stupit after all, innit?

  
Also, it took me a long time to write why I wanted that song, cause I couldn’t ask Mum to help or check it over, cause there’s stuff I wrote down I don’t want her to read. Not because it wasn’t true, only I didn’t want her to be bovered by it.

  
I explained as much of it as I could do on the paper, about how when I was really little and Mum was in hospital and my Dad just died, I’d trouble sleeping at Bubbie and Zaydie’s house by meself. I missed hearing the music through the wall in our old house where I lived with Mum, Dad, Jams and City in Topanga Canyon. Even though I was so little at the time, I still remember the music, coming in soft through the futon they nailed up on the wall to damp it out. My Dad’s voice singing was what I remember most about him and even that I’m not sure if I just know it from listening to recordings or that. All I’m sure of is that they’d always start on “In the Lock Up” right before I went to sleep. It was their “signature song” Mum said, like David Bowie doing “Rebel, Rebel” at evry concert.

  
Nights at Bubie and Zaydie’s, after the crash, the quiet was really really quiet. Like so much that I couldn’t sleep. I’d cry and cry and Bubie says her and Zaydie’s hearts nearly broke just hearing me ask over and over again for Mum and Dad to come sing me to sleep.

  
Finally, Aunt Cammy, who wanted some peace and quiet to do her homework, stuck these headphones on my head and put on Mum and Dad playing “In the Lock Up” and miraculously I stopped crying.

  
As the Fuck-Ups started playing, it was like they was practicing right there in the next room beside me, only separated by a mattress and a wall. And while Mum was in hospital and Dad was gone, I drifted off each night to the sound of them playing and singing together, alone in the big bed at Bubie and Zaydie’s.  
It’s kind of a weird story and when I stood with my paper stuck out in my hand to give it to Mr. Oh, I was suddenly nervous. Like what if he thought the song was stupid or he didn’t believe me about why I wanted it and thought I was just taking the piss?  
He was marking maths tests after all the other kids left when I went.

  
“Ocean, can I help you?” he goes and I looked at the ground, even though I’m not normally shy at all and everybody says I’m a chattahbox.

  
“My song, uh it’s my week to choose, yeahr?”

  
“Oh it is, isn’t? I’d almost forgot.”

  
How could he? It’s all I thought about like the whole week, I was finking, but I didn’t say it.

  
“Sorry, just had so much marking to do before mid-term, things’ve been bonkers!”

  
He put down the test paper he was marking and turned to face me with his full attention on me, like a great big sun turning all its power suddenly on one single flower and I kinda felt like I wanted to hide and he said “All right Miss Ocean, lay it on me!”

  
And now I felt more nervous than before and the paper was shaking in my hand as I thrust it out at him.

  
He took it and I think he expected me to run out to the playground as soon as he did, but instead I stayed and waited. I wanted to be sure he’d be okay with doing the song. Mum was always saying how the Fuck-Ups’ music wasn’t “mainstream” and that’s the reason they didn’t play them on regular radio. Maybe it wasn’t as good a choice as I thought to choose Mum’s band.

  
He’d didn’t read all the lyrics I wrote or the explanation I spent so long on, just the title of the song and the band what played it. He gave a little laugh and raised one eyebrow, before looking up to meet my eye.

  
“You’re not taking the mick are ya?” he asked me and I saw him see my face fall—wot I mean is, I was upset.

  
“I mean, ‘cause of the name of the band and that?” he added quickly.

  
“No, no!” I said. “I- I want this song! It’s my fav’rite!”

  
“Is it now?”

  
“Uh-huh.”

  
“You know, back when I was a lad at uni in Nottingham I saw the F— uh, this band play. It was in a students’ pub hall, but they were bloody brilliant. Blew the whole room away. It was just before ‘In the Lock Up’ came out. They were promoting the album they did before, I forget the name, it was something like—“

  
“Goods n’ Services.”

  
“That’s right! Well done! How’d you know? Your parents fans?”

  
“They were in the band.”

  
“They were? Seriously? In the band?”

  
“Yeah, really, my mum is Ionee Israls.” I didn’t say who me Dad was. I didn’t want to talk about him being dead and stuff because it feels weird saying it to other people. Anyway, he probably knew if he was a fan. “The bloke wot usedta come pick me up from school sometimes, when Mum was at the shop, that’s Jams Deryan, he played bass.”

  
“Get out!”

  
“No, it’s true, I’m not ona blag!”

  
“No, of course I believe you, I just never thought…All right, all right, I absolutely have to play it then! I can make up other words if there are any swears in it, how about that?”

  
“There’s no swears, I checked!”

  
“’Bastard’ isn’t a curse word?”

  
“Oh, well maybe just a few…” I am actually, technically a bastard, because my parents weren’t married, but then Jemma and Harvey and Miri in class would be too, so that’s not possible. It’s just what City told me, but City’s a liar anyway. Forget about City. Concentrate on--

  
“I just have one request—“ he interrupts me.

  
“What’s that then?”

  
He blushed and now he looked embarrassed which I knew couldn’t really be possible because he was the teacher.

  
“I know they probably won’t agree to it, but do you think when your mum comes to pick you up I could ask her—if I do the song Friday—right before home time—do you think she might—I don’t know, accompany me maybe? It would give the other kids a real kick, I know.”

  
“That’s brilliant!”

  
And it was.

  
That Friday Mum came along with her guitar and the green Honeytone mini portable amp she used to use for busking. We cleared the desks out of the middle of the room, so they were all on the sides, leaving the whole carpet area for dancing. Then Mum came in, and played a duet with Mr. Oh. And we all danced, and I got to show the other kids how to pogo and we were all jumping up and down like it was a real concert and going completely men’al! I smiled so much my cheeks were hurting and it was the best day of my whole life ever!

  
Afterwards, in the playground, all the other kids wanted to play with me, like I was a super hero and everybody seemed like they was my friend and we ran round and round the climbing frame playing tag.

  
Once, I looked up from going up the climbing frame to see if I could find Mum. She was there, sitting on the picnic table fiddling with the knobs on her guitar, like she was trying to tune it, looking up at Mr. Oh with this sly little smile like she was trying to be sexy or something. Mr. Oh was talking, waving his hands about like he did in class when he explained stuff and he was smiling too. They were staring into each other’s eyes, I swear it, like maybe they were starting to fall in love or something. Fucking weird, I know. But still, it might be nice, innit? Having a dad? Especially if he was Mr. Oh.

  
So I looked up at the bright blue sky from the top of the climbing frame, high up over everyone below. There was a cloud there, right beside the sun, small and puffy and perfect. It looked like Shawn the Sheep from telly. Secretly, I made a wish on that perfect cloud that Mum and Mr. Oh would fall in love and get married.  
Some of the guys she’s been out with I didn’t like, but not Mr. Oh, he would be perfect. I knew he’d know how to act right around kids. He was a teachah right? He liked Dr. Who, too. I wished he could be my dad.

  
I wanted a dad who was alive so bad!

  
Later on, after my most perfect day ever, me and Mum, we was walking to the bus stop going home and I was asking her again, “Can I carry the guitar?”

  
“No, Sweetie.”

  
“Please please please please please! Puh-leeeeeeze!”

  
“C’mon Ocean, leave it out,” she grumbled.

  
But I ran in front of her all excited and then started jogging backwards so we could talk face to face because she was being a silly turtle, walking so slow. “Hey, isn’t Mr. Oh brilliant?”

  
“Yeah, he’s well fit,” she said all cool and that, but I could see she was well impressed. “Nice too. You know he filmed a pilot in the summer for Channel 4?”

  
“No. What’s a pilot?”

  
“It’s like an experimental show.”

  
“Cool! Hey, maybe one day he’ll be on Dr. Who!”

  
“Ah yes, the epitome of the theatrical profession.”

  
“But you like Dr. Who!”

  
“Yeah, but not as much as you do.”

  
“So what? Nobody likes Dr. Who as much as I do! Megan says I’m going to be the thirteenth doctor when I grow up!” I bragged. It’s something else I think about when I’m up on the top of the climbing frame wishing on clouds. “It’s my life’s ambition!”

  
“Your life’s ambition? You’re all of what, ten years old? How long’ve you had this ambition? Five minutes? Hate to burst your bubble luv, but I think Dr. Who’s a boy.”

  
“Psssssh! Don’t be daft, Mum! He’s an alien. You know he changes into different bodies with each regeneration! Sooooo one day he’s got to regenerate as a girl, I mean it’s like— like--“ I tried to remember the name of the new thing we were learning in maths, and surprisingly, it came. “Like probability! He’s got to be a girl one day!”

  
“Mmm, not holding me breath on that one.”

  
“Anyways, I don’t care if he stays a boy, I’d just change myself from a girl to a boy like Seb did and then I could be Dr. Who anyways!” (This is true by the way! Uncle Jams told me sort-of-uncle Seb really used to be a girl named Sophie! For real, no joke!)

  
“Well, I guess that’s one way to do it,” mumbled Mum, sounding slightly annoyed because I mentioned Seb. But now she was far behind me, getting out of puff with the guitar on her back, slow-coaching along with her stick. “Oi, Ocean hold up!”

  
I stopped at the corner near where they had this outdoor market. There was a concrete bench there so she could take a rest cause her face was going a bit red.  
“Let’s take a breather, shall we?”

  
She sat down on one end of this bench and I climbed up on the other end and stood up. “Ocean, get offer there!”

  
“No need to get all shouty!” I looked down at the top of her head, where you could see the dark roots coming through the layer of bleached blonde and the Manic Panic purple on top of that. Once she let me dye part of my hair with it, but we forgot the bleach part underneath and my hair is really dark so you couldn’t even see the purple. My hair is black and my skin colour is like light brown, so I look a bit more like Dad than Mum. He was born in Peckham, but his family came from India originally. Mum won’t let me put bleach in my hair until I’m older ‘cause of chemicals. I don’t know why they don’t make Manic Panic for dark haired people. Cleo from Reggaetown in the market says it’s racism, but Mum says Cleo isn't always right and is also frequently elevated, which means she gets high too much.

  
“I could stand up here and play guitar, just like Uncle Jams used to at Southbank. It’s just like a stage! We could be buskers! We’ll make loads of money! Don’t worry, you won’t have to stand up here, since it’s hard for you when your leg’s poorly, but you could be my helper and hold out one of your cool hats to the people passing by so they could give us money!”

  
“What? Like a trained monkey? Ta for that,” she said with a tip of a pretend hat.

  
Then Mum reached up and tickled me in my armpit and I giggled like crazy and was forced to sit down. She knows all my tickly spots, which isn’t fair because I still don’t know hers and I’ve had ten whole years to practice!

  
I gasped laughing and now Mum was laughing too. I sat down beside her and curled myself into her side and grabbed her stick.

  
“Oi! What about please Little Miss Grabby-pants?”

  
“Miss Grabby-pants is not a real Mister Men or Little Miss!”

  
“Cheeky monkey, no more audiobooks for you.”

  
I pretended to shake the mini-eight ball on the top of Mum’s stick, like I did with the real magic eight ball we had at the shop. You could ask it yes or no questions and it would tell you answers like “it is certain” or “reply hazy, try again,” stuff like that. The one on Mum’s stick was smaller, smaller even than a real eight ball, but I like to pretend anyway.

  
“Oh Super-Powerful Magic Eight Ball!” I waved my hand over it like a crystal ball. “Tell us true…is Mum going to marry Mr. Oh?”

  
“O-SHUN!” She grabbed it back, but I think she was only pretending to be angry. “I am not marrying Kevin.”

  
“KEVIN?” My eyes goggled out as I realized that Kevin must be Mr. Oh’s Christian name. “Mum! You know his real name!”

  
“Wot?”

  
“You don’t understand! That’s like his secret identity or somefing!”

  
“All my days, he’s not Spider-man! He’s just a human being!”

  
“But he’s a teaCHAH!”

  
“Yeah and you know it’s like illegal or something for teachers to date their students’ parents, so shtum. Don’t want people getting the wrong idera.”

  
“Are you sure? Is that really true?”

  
“He probably has a girlfriend anyway, or he’s a gay or something, so I wouldn’t stake my hopes on it, I was you.”

  
“Oh,” I said, my shoulders sinking. Still, the way they were talking together… “But you was flir’ing with him, yeahr?”

  
She shrugged and gave me a naughty smile. “Just window shopping.”

  
Window shopping. Which means just looking at stuff in the shops, because you can’t afford it. I think Mum does that a lot. Not with me though, I always get most of the toys I want. Mum makes sure.

  
But there’re things you want that don’t come in stores.

  
I couldn’t have Jams for my dad, because he’d buggered off with Seb, and now I couldn’t have Mr. Oh either. If I had Mr. Oh as my dad Uncle Jams would be well jealous! He’d be sorry for leaving us then! Mr. Oh was perfect, way cooler than sturpid old Uncle Jams! He was one of the coolest people I ever met.  
Apparently too cool for our crap school, too, in the end.

  
That show Mr. Oh worked on? It turned out that even though it was in something called “turnaround” for near eight months, the pilot was finally picked up by the Dave network, which is a special channel on telly for comedy shows. Mr. Oh had to go up north to Wales to film more episodes, so he had to take a leave of absence to go be a professional fucking wanker on a professional fucking telly show. What a berk. He just pretended he cared about our class and about Mum, as well, but his show was more important in the end, so he can sod off!

  
But that means now we’re stuck with stupid, strict Mrs. Oberika instead and it’s all maths maths maths all the time and obey the rules and boring “literacy” instead of roleplay and novel study and music.

  
Worse still, I don’t think she likes my Dr. Who stories. I don’t know why, but I reckon maybe she thinks I think they’re real, like I’m too stupid to understand wot’s pretend and wot’s not. Mum says me making stuff up confuses her because she has no imagination.

  
Also, I think maybe I should’ve left out the story about Mum and her sonic stick making the sprinklers turn on in Sainsbury’s and us making off with that box of Cheerios. I’m not sure Mrs. Oberika understands how it is with us or why Mum does stuff like that. I hope she doesn’t it out. I hope she doesn’t guess that some stuff is pretend, but not really ALL pretend, y’know?


	4. Cammy:  A Town Called Malice

CAMMY HALES  
(Toronto, Canada)

4\. A TOWN CALLED MALICE

I have to keep the operating instructions in my mind, go over them, my goals, bring myself back to them no matter how much my mind wanders, no matter how much I yearn to run and flee into the used CDs of Sonic Boom just around the corner. A CD will be your reward, I tell myself. For the execution of…

The Cunning Plan:  
Step One:

  
I get off the 7 bus at Bathurst Station and walk down to Bloor Street. It’s a Saturday afternoon, but I’m only just up. I don’t have to wake up at any specific time in the morning because I don’t have a job right now. Also I’m lazy, and on psych meds which make me sleepy and it’s cold, like -17 celcius outside, so who wants to go out, right?

  
When everything’s frozen like this, evidence from last night’s partying doesn’t wash away so easy. Take exhibit A: Vomit flash frozen to the mural wall outside Lee’s Palace, my favourite live music venue. Someday I’m going to play there, you wait and see. There’s more frozen puke in the corner crease between the wall and sidewalk of the next door convenience store. The trail picks up again outside Midoco, the art supply store, which has done nothing to deserve this and t is lost somewhere once more as it veers off into the alleyway past the thankfully unsullied mural as I’m nearly to Bathurst Street, crossing now, on to Honest Ed’s, he of the gigantic million bulb light up sign, looking to get my favourite Heroburger with sweet potato fries combo and use the drink machine that allows you to mix your juices and contains six (six!) different kinds of lemonade. I have a peach ice tea, strawberry lemonade and raspberry lemonade juice mix, my own personal recipe. Two presses on the ice tea and only a press each on the two lemonade flavours to get the ratio just right. Lunch will cost over thirteen bucks, but today is all about getting in the right frame of mind.

  
The right frame of mind for what?  
To avert the depression which will be the inevitable result of mission failure. It is a distinct possibility. All eventualities must be accounted for. I must be equipped with proper sustenance if I’m to survive this blow.

  
As always, my anxious little hamster mind’s busy hatching scenarios of doom and gloom. Stop listening brain! Focus on tasting the sweet potato fries. Yes, yes, there you go, experience the fries, the pictures of burgers on the wall, pretend you’re a little microscopic person crawling over the outline of the picture, anything to stop being nervous about a billion possible scary futures, to ground yourself in something real, anything real, even if it’s only a picture of a burger and just breath. Yeah, occasionally, therapy comes in handy.

  
On to  
Step Two:

  
Cross the street to TD to check the street to the bank machine to check my balance. I take a deep breath, close my eyes before I look at my balance.  
This part is crucial, because to get the visa to go to the UK, you need to meet a few conditions. For one you have to be 30 or under, that’s why it’s the “youth mobility scheme.” For another, you need 5,000 dollars in the bank and a bank statement to prove it. I’m still 28, not too old, not yet. It’s the money that’s the main problem. It’s not that the visa itself costs that much, it’s just they want you to be able to show border services that once in the UK you’ll have some money to live off of.

  
I figured out that if I took out the minimum amount they wanted on a line of credit from the bank, then presented them with a sheet showing my bank balance they’d think I had the money. Then I could transfer it all back after I got the visa and no one would be the wiser. The only hitch was in getting the money off the line of credit. The bank said there might be some issues getting it up to that amount because of my low income and I was waiting on their decision. Five days on and I still hadn’t heard anything. I was checking every day though and today was Sunday. The bank was closed, but the machine was still working.  
I punched in my PIN, pressed the screen button for Account Balance balance, faint in the rapidly dimming afternoon light of midwinter and the number came up… $5,062.81.

  
Five thousand, sixty-two dollars and eighty-one cents!  
I can’t believe it! They actually okayed me for the line! Now just to get the print out the print out on official bank statement paper from the bank tomorrow and I could be at the UK Border office the same afternoon.

  
I felt in the back of my wallet for the weird-sized British passport photos. Still there. I got a twenty-dollar bill from the machine, green like an American bill, but with the Queen’s picture on the back. And as I slip it into my wallet next to the passport photos, I’m thinking how funny it is, we have the Queen’s picture on all the money, tacked up in every official building, still operating like some pseudo-monarchist colony, still celebrating Queen Victoria’s bloody birthday every May, for pete’s sake and we’re still not allowed to just move or work there. You’d think we’d get some rights at least for putting up with her ugly mug all this time, but no, they’d rather give it to the descendants of the Nazis who tried to bomb them into oblivion and kill the Jews, rather than the descendants of the grade A Canadian canon fodder they employed at Dieppe. Not that I have anything against modern Germans, they’re cool, I just think we deserve to be invited to the party too, you know?

  
People have short memories when it’s economically expedient, but fuck it, I’m not wasting my time on negative shit today. I’m not angry or resentful anymore, not today, not that I’m one step closer to being free. If only Border Services okays the sheet from the bank, the final hurdle will be over. And as for actually having money to settle in England with? Well, hey, what’re work and family for?

  
Now that I know I’m no longer trapped here, the sky seems higher, the streets seem wider, that suffocating feeling, of a box closing in on me is gone. Now that I know I don’t have to stay here if I don’t want to I start growing a little nostalgic about the place.

  
I remember how it was when I came here from LA. I was 16. After living in LA, Washington and San Diego, coming here was supposed to be like coming home. And maybe it was, for Mum and Dad, at least. At first I really liked it. I think maybe the city was cooler then, before the glass condo towers invaded downtown, landing like a bunch of Borg space ships overnight.

  
Older people don’t seem bothered. My parents do, ‘cause they’ve been around a bit and lived outside, but plenty of their friends who never left don’t really care. Why should they, when they’re selling off their houses for more than sixty times what they bought them for in the 1970s, hanging onto the jobs they’ve had since the 1980s, keeping the new blood out. It’s certainly that way in teaching. The Ontario College of Teachers, which is our informal union or something, only gives a shit about the members who’ve paid dues the longest. Fuck that scene, I’m taking my ball and going to another field.

  
The older folks with real jobs look down on us here, this lost and in their minds, lazy, generation. They tell us to stop protesting, occupying and complaining-- go work the oil sands in Alberta, take temp jobs for contracts with no benefits, volunteer and intern for free, go abroad to teach. Whatever really, just please get lost. The message is loud and clear: You’re not needed here.

  
The “go abroad” option is the only one of the three that ever felt like much of a possibility to me. It’s our well-guarded secret that one of Canada’s major exports is university educated young people; newly minted English-speaking grads, available right away for all your ESL needs. Have you studied English in South Korea, Japan, Thailand, China, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or Hong Kong? Congratulations, you’ve been taught by a Canadian.

  
Half the time it seems like everyone I went to university with who didn’t graduate with a degree in engineering or medicine ended up teaching abroad. At least it’s better than freezing your ass off in Nunavut where there’s no sun in the winter and no bagel shops to speak of.  
Me, I’m tired of it, tired of this whole fucking scene. People telling me “you have to manage your expectations.” Fuck that. It’s time to blow this pop stand and not in a sexual way, either.

  
I’m outta here before I end up like _________.  
Sometimes it seems like a foregone conclusion, but I keep telling myself just because _________ went that way, doesn’t mean it’s my destiny. I have lots more to keep me here and my mental health issues are different from his. But goddamn, if you have any natural affinity for mental illness, let me tell you, feeling disconnected and unwanted by the society that spawned you will bring it out like nobody’s business.

  
These diseases are not a myth, or some label society puts on people who don’t fit the mold, no matter what some dumbass book like “the Myth of Mental Illness” wants you to think. I never fit the mold sure and caught some flak for it at school, but inside, most of the time, I felt right enough. The day I started to feel weird, I can tell you, I know when it was, when I started to feel wrong, that something was clearly not right, the same way a person who has a heart attack could tell you exactly when it happened.

  
I’m only just starting to get better, what with the meds and therapy and everything. But you have to know it’s like AIDS in a way, depression. People don’t die directly from the disease itself. What kills you is all the other shit that takes over when the body can’t protect itself, when the mental immune system goes down, all the evil bacteria of doubt and fear, of not believing you’re worth anything, of thinking that you’ll never feel happy again like you once did that creeps in and multiplies, even though you may have the best parents in the world, the most optimistic self-confident outlook on life to start with, mental illness can tear all that shit down and when all the bad shit takes over, when the opportunistic infectious thoughts take over and multiply, that’s what kills a person. That’s what happened to my friend. Our best friend _________, (I can’t even write his name amymore) and Mitch, my boyfriend, leaving without taking me with, that’s just the cherry on top, when I was the one who always talking about leaving about going back to LA or making a start in New York, and he always demurred, wanted to play it safe. And now he’s the one who really gets to do and here’s me still stuck here, still kicking around with all the old memories of our time together, and that time before ________’s death wondering if I could have made a difference.

  
This is the last I’ll talk to you about it and even now, I’m not really talking about it. Look, I’ll level with you, it’s not just the job situation and perpetually shitty weather that’s got me ready to leave. Part of it is that there’s just too many memories here. Every street we ever walked together, every highway we ever drove, movie theatre we went to, coffee shop or bar we drank at, club where we danced—all of it—it’s all steeped in this love and friendship like super-strong tea, infused with all that’s gone from my life and emotions I don’t know if I’ll ever feel again.

  
There’s this undercurrent of desperation running not far beneath the surface, denied, but present all the same, that’s part of it, part of everything here for me. The sights and sounds that used to be normal, but aren’t anymore. New meanings attached to things; It’s part of the fabric of my life and maybe other people are facing the same demons, but you wouldn’t know, we don’t talk about it, don’t show that face to the rest of the world. It wouldn’t be safe. Do not disturb on the hotel room door, this horror of calling attention to yourself in any way.

  
And now there are colours I don’t wear and places I don’t go, bad things on endless loop in my mind that don’t stop once they get started and I wonder if I’ll ever get free of this thinking and thinking, of my mind out of control, the panic and horror of living in a mind that sometimes doesn’t even feel like my own, it’s a hard thing to explain to someone who’s never felt it. There are times when I can make myself behave, when I force myself to go to certain places, or say the words I don’t usually let myself say and I can do it when I absolutely have to, but it hurts and disgusts me, like physically you know? So I prefer to avoid it. You’d never notice, not unless I told you. I’m good at disguising it. It’s not hard to do, when nobody outside wants to see it anyway. The things I can think when given free range, they scare me. I wonder if we’re all capable of it, or if it’s just me. Luckily, the current regime of medication seems to be working. Now if only I could find some job to keep myself busy, maybe a structure to plug into, some way to feel useful, now that would make me truly free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> XXXX  
> Chapter title "A Town Called Malice" by the Jam  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfpRm-p7qlY


	5. Ionee: Hanging on the Telephone

IONEE ISRALS  
(London, UK)

5\. HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE

This time I’m going to tell her. Admit it Ionee, this charade, what you’re doing, it’s beyond ridiculous. Just tell her! If Cammy truly does come to the UK, and she’s been talking about it long enough and not doing it, that who knows if it will ever really come to pass), but if she does, you mark my words, she’s going to know something’s up as soon as she sees you. You can’t keep this from Mum forever.

  
I thought up the exact words and phrases of how to explain the accident with my leg, none of which involved me attacking Jams or reuniting with City, reasonable sounding reasons, plus more to explain why I held off telling her and other things to make it sound like it’s not really as bad as it is and to subtly ask for her professional opinion about getting the revision done.

  
Today’s the day.  
But first, to politely ask after the rest of the family.

  
“So Cammy’s doing better, yeah?”

  
“Yes, but you know, we’re still concerned. This teaching in England thing, don’t you think it might be too much for her? Just two months ago she wouldn’t leave the main floor of the house and now she wants to go to a completely different country? She has no support system out there and if anything happens she’ll be so far away. She’s not like you honey, she’s never been very independent. Please, can you make sure to look out for her?”

  
I can tell she’s probably picking her fingers in nervousness, but what can I do about it from across the ocean?

  
“’Course I will, just relax.” I’m trying to be soothing, but I’m feeling jumpy as hell myself, scared of what she’s going to say to the next bit of info coming down the pike.

  
“I told her she’s just running away from her problems. I mean, what’s the point? She’s not British, she’ll just have to come right back when her visa’s up. ”  
“I dunno, might meet a nice chap out here, shack up, fall in love… wouldn’t be the first time for someone in our family.”

  
Pause on the other end of the line. I don’t know why I have to provoke her all the time, talking about my father, her first husband. Not my Dad, let me be clear on that, Frederick, Cammy and Shoshi’s biological father, her second husband, he’s my dad. Genetics can suck it. I’d never talk about Dr. David Asher Israls around Dad. I’d never want to hurt him because I love him and none of that shit that happened in the past was his fault. Mum though, it’s unkind, but I’ve always wondered how she could be so easily fooled.

  
“Let’s hope not,” she says gloomily.  
“Aw c’mon, wasn’t so bad.”  
“He was a criminal dentist!”  
“The absolute worst kind, I know.”  
“Don’t speak ill of the dead,” she chides.

  
At least I do speak about him, now and again, but I don’t want to argue. My foot’s gone pins and needles again and the ache is getting to me. I got to find some cocadomal or paracetamol or more of the prescription whatchamacallit before we have our conversation about the leg business. All my days, I can’t do it like this, pain messing up my verbiage and shit. I can’t even think straight, so don’t go all judgey, yeahr?

  
“Yes, yes, not right to slag off people who aren’t here to defend themselves, roight, roight,” I go as I hunt through my linty pockets, finding all I have is a random strawberry shaped rubber. The pencil kind, not the good kind at that. Although you’d fit something shaped like a strawberry over a penis God only kn—  
“Ionee! Are you listening?”

  
Sorry Mum, thinking about cock again. I start pinching the ankle hoping that might make it stop throbbing. If I take the tablets now, it’ll be at least twenty minutes of this before the medicine kicks in and the longer I wait, the longer I’ll have to put up with the pain and I’m almost jumping out of my skin as it is.  
“Your grandmother, she--”

  
At this I get that shitty sinking feeling because I know that sentence taken to full stop isn’t “Your grandmother, she’s taken up sky-diving or joined the merchant marine.” Not when the person in question is 90 something years old. Her heart’s been pumping weaker and weaker these past few years, slowly starving the parts of her body the oxygenated blood can’t get to fast enough, including her brain, changing her personality, making her into someone I only half know. She is going slowly, slowly. It’s painful to watch, especially for Mum. All this frontal lobe lack of inhibition shit starts happening and she says things out loud that would horrify her if she was in her right mind. You know it’s not her fault and that she still loves you, but it doesn’t make what’s said hurt any less. Especially when it’s the kind of stuff you know is true, but everyone’s just too polite to say it.

  
Your parents did everything for you and look at you! Throwing it all away. Have you no shame? Going around looking like that! Bad blood, that’s what it is. I knew when she married your father no good would come of it, that she’d regret it, I told her! And here you are, turning out just like him; a selfish fuck-up who’ll just go and break her heart.

  
Funny, she always talked so proper before…  
“She needs an operation—“  
“For her heart?”  
“Yeah, they said if she doesn’t get it within the next six months she’ll die. It’s just a minor little operation, they won’t have to open her chest or anything, but she says she won’t let them do it. She says—“ Mum’s voice broke, “she says she’s ready to go and not to take her to the hospital even if she has another heart attack. I mean there are things they can try that would improve her life, but she just refuses everything. Your Dad says we should form her, but it’s her life. I want to help, but she won’t go anywhere near the hospital. What can I say to make her see reason? She just yells at me for taking her to the doctor and refuses to take her meds and—“  
Dammit, where’re those fucking tablets?  
“Listen, Mum I gotta go down the shops.”  
“What?”  
“Uh, Ocean needs notebook paper.”  
“Ionee, I’m trying to talk to you about something serious and you’re just—“  
“Tell Dad I say hi. Sorry.”  
“But I want to talk to you about—“

  
You can’t always get what you want. I end the call and grab the laundry purse full of pound coins. The short walk to the cornershop is brutal, that old Rolling Stones song rattling around in my head like coins in the purse, like the metal I know is loose in my body and I’m thinking of this one time when the underwire popped out of my bra in the washing machine and every time it tumbled over this tiny bit of sticky out metal going ping ping on the drum so loud you could hear it clear up to the floor above, all this racket from such a tiny little thing,

  
Limping along I swear as soon as I have myself a bit of Ribena, painkiller, muscle relaxants and night time cold medicine in me I’m calling her back.

  
Waiting in line with Mr. Jimmy. Taking bloody forever while some trembly old bird counts out a million coins for a small pack of Jammy Dodgers and I stand on one foot like a flamingo. Fuck, I don’t want to get old. If I have to use a cane now, can you picture me at seventy? Shit. Still, she smiles at me as she turns to go like she’s genuinely pleased to see me for some reason. I nod and smile back, ‘cause a smile costs nothing and surprisingly it makes me feel a bit better.  
When I finally get back to the flat, out of puff from the torture of the stairs, I faceplant on the couch and stay there the rest of the night.

  
Or I would’ve done, ‘cept the phone rings, buzzing me in the pocket at 3 AM. Cammy. Having forgot about the time difference in typical Cammy fashion. Again.  
Here to tell me she's on her way in just a few weeks. Typical, stuff doesn't change for ages and then when it does it's everything all at once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> XXXX  
> Chapter title "Hanging on the Telephone" song by Blondie  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCjdsxJeD_Q


	6. Ionee:  This is a public service announcement...with guitars!

(London, UK)

5.“THIS IS A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT…”

 

When I was a kid I used to wake up every morning at 5:30 AM. It made my parents mental until they taught me how to use the VCR by myself. But once you’ve been in a band for a while, you get so you’re no longer a morning person. I am not the best me I can be at eight in the morning. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to suss out a school around here that starts after 9, so here we are, me and Ocean, at the mercy of the Man’s timetable. I go down the hall towards her bedroom now, toting my guitar. Her room’s the same size as mine and painted pastel mint green, or at least that’s what it said on the tin when we painted it last. There are glow-in-the-dark stars all over the walls and ceiling so that when it’s dark it’s like she’s in outer space.

  
Back when she was really little, I always wanted her to have loads of room to play in and spread her wings, like I had. When me and Sy and the band had money and were recording in California, we rented this massive house out in Topanga Canyon, loads of desert and weird scrubby trees all around, a real live nature preserve right in the middle of L.A, like the cover of that U2 album “Joshua Tree.” There were even deer sometimes. It had what the Californian estate agent called this “awesome sunken playroom” which made me think of sunken treasure ships that and Ocean just loved it. She was a California baby, all the way down to her name, never meant to come back here to dreary old London, here where even rich people live in small spaces.

  
Considering what we pay for our current place though, the space ain’t bad. At least she has her own room, so that’s something, even if I had to share with Jams. Our place is a two bedroom flat right above Park’s Big Bite Fish and Chip shop which is run by a bunch of cool Turkish chaps, though none by the surname Park. Willesden Green tube station’s just down the street.

  
I was the one started in on calling the place “Parklife” and Jams thought it was funny, sort of a pun on the Blur song so we kept it going. My room, and Jams’s too, when he lived here, overlooks the street. Ocean’s is the quiet one in the back. I don’t mind the noise . All the time I spent on the road’s made me good at sleeping through anything and there’s even a small Sainsbury’s across the street for groceries with a pleasantly sleazy pub next door, a delicious Chinese take-away called the Blue Orchid a block away, three dry cleaners within easy walking distance and a cab stand round the corner. There’s this beautiful mosque with a green domed minaret that Ocean can see out her window that looks like this Arabian castle. When she was little I used to tell her Rapunzel from the lived up in the tower. She was rather cross with me when her RE teacher incorrectly assumed she was taking the piss, filling in a diagram of a mosque with “Rapunzel’s Towers” for the minarettes at school. Being a mum’s taught me loads of lessons, including the very important one that every lie and half truth you tell will come back someday to bite you in the ass. My advice, choose your lies carefully.  
I rock up to Ocean’s bedroom and she’s still not showing any sign of being up, even though I know she is. If it weren’t for that I wouldn’t try what I’m about to do now, but I just can’t resist…  
Carefully, carefully, I shuffle-sneak up to the edge of her bed and croon softly to her: “This is a wake up time announcement…”  
“WITH GUITARS!”  
And then I hit her with the guitar riff from the top of “Know Your Rights” and then Ocean hits me full square with her pillow.  
Eventually I bounce into bed with her and begin an aggressive campaign of tickling.  
“Mu-UM!” she protests and scuttles under the duvet.  
Still one of my favourite past-times, rousing my baby in the morning.

  
I have various styles of wake up call from the obnoxious to the cuddly. How someone as perfect as Ocean actually came out of me I’ll never know. It’s like reverse “Alien” or something.

  
She’s ever so cute. Her body only seems to take up half the bed and she likes to curl up like a hedgehog under her rainbow print duvet, the blanket over her head completely. Only her ponytail sticks up on the pillow like the top of a carrot underground. Even at almost eleven, she still sleeps with the fuzzy pink blanket my Bubie, (her great-gran) knitted for her when she was just born, though I’m under strict rules never to tell anyone at school about “Pinks,” as he’s affectionately called around these parts. As to why a faceless pink blanket is of decidedly male gender in Ocean’s eyes, you’d have to ask her, but I guess it makes about as much sense as anything else.

  
“C’mon Sunshine. We have to be speedy today. After I drop you off at school I gotter go to the aeroport.”  
“Yeah! I forgot! Aunt Cammy’s coming today!”  
“Right, so best be quick like a bunny and get yourself sorted.” I glanced at her paper-strewn desk. “You put your maths homework away, yeah?”  
“Yes Mum,” she sighs in that annoyed tone I just know I’m going to hear more from once she hits her teenage years. Once I see she’s full out of bed, I go back to my own room to get dressed.

  
I can hear the electric shower starting up downstairs in the second floor apartment as I shiver out of my T-shirt and boxers, wash up and brush my teeth. The flat downstairs, sandwiched between us and the Big Bite is much larger. It houses a motley and constantly rotating collection of people who seemed to mostly hail from former British colonies or the EU. There’re two teachers, one from Poland and one from Australia, a doctorate student from Pakistan, a Nigerian junior oil executive and a classical violinist from Hong Kong, with a boyfriend and girlfriend engineering pair from Portugal thrown into the mix just to keep things varied. All of them, except the Portuguese couple, are desperate to hang onto or extend their work or student visas. The Nigerian dude proposed marrying me for that set purpose, but I put the kibosh on that shit right out the gate. I’m not that desperate yet. Still, it can’t be easy for them, existing in this weird state of both missing home and desperately not wanting to go back there for good.

  
Be thankful for small mercies, I tell myself, leastways I don’t have to worry about getting an NHS number, working under the table or dodging immigration.  
Nope, the only thing I really got to worry about around here is the stairs. I reckon they’ll defeat me in the end. It’s inevitable. I’m not even forty and they’re already making inroads. Someday I will find the fucking cunt who thought it would be a good idea to put the washing machine and dryer in the basement and fucking castrate him. I am serious.

  
Thank God for dry cleaning, even if it’s killing the environment and costs way too much, I couldn’t do without it. The entire wall of my room is taken up with a built-in wardrobe and it is full of dry cleaning bags, lined up side by side, like giant plastic condoms, smelling like huffable chemicals that probably shouldn’t be legal in this day and age.

  
I remove a black, button-down long sleeve dress shirt from it’s giant cock-sleeve and a black suit vest with a red patch on it, the ace of hearts, stitched over the left breast pocket. I tear open another and remove a crisp pair of trousers, black with discrete red pinstripes, cotton and breathable with a few metal buckles on ‘em for good measure. This outfit I’ve been saving, even though the rest of my clean clothes are growing scarce.

  
Perish the thought I’d ever show up to meet Cammy looking like some daft geezer wot hangs out on the bridge by Camden Lock. No dangling braces, studded leather or the like for me. True punks, like the Clash and the Sex Pistols  and the Jam and Television, early on, they couldn’t afford leather. That shit all came after. Not like I was really around for any of that. I was just a baby then, but it’s true, look it up. I have loads of books, back at the shop, on the early days of punk, the New Romantics, New Wave, Glamrock and all that. Five biographies of David Bowie and I’ve read them all, too. I like reading, makes the time pass when patrons’re scarce. I’ll read just about anything too, 19th century novels, fan fiction, sci-fi magazines, one pound comics from Megacity, you name it. As long as it’s cheap and available, I consume it.

  
I’m already wearing the hard plastic brace that goes under my heel and up to my knee on the sides, held on with Velcro that tends to catch on my trousers. These days I can’t walk without it.

  
Now for some shoes—DMs perhaps? I have a few pair, but they don’t get much wear these days. Most of the time I just wear this pair of Blundstones Mum sent me from Canada. They’re light and pull on quick, no fuss. Heavy DMs are too much of a bother with all the laces for me now, especially mornings.

  
This steel-toed pair I had once I got off Construction Surplus, now that shit was sweet. Long ago, when Sy was alive, and we got drunk at this biker pub outside a bar in Leeds, I used them to help him kick the shit out of this skinhead. Only time I ever got into a serious physical row like that, but c’mon guy was a fucking Nazi, innit? Except, to be fair I think Sy had the poor cunt all confused, what with Sy being this Indian guy wearing a National Front badge “ironically” on his jacket, like I hadn’t told him a million fucking times people’d get the wrong idea. Of course this chav in the bar loses the fucking plot. That shit’s not about fashionable irony to anyone except Sy and Malcolm McLaren, and it don’t matter how much Sy goes on saying that’s all it is, it fucking well isn’t, okay?

  
But that was Sy all over. Sometimes he’d get into these moods where he’d do anything’d get a rise out of you. He’d be bad as City when he’d a mind to, winding people up like toys just to see them go at it, provoking a row just to feel the thrill of things getting dangerous. It’s like there had to be some serious shit-disturbing going on or the world was just too fucking boring for tears.  
It was stupid, but afterwards we shagged like crazed rabbits in the back of the van, leavingJams and City outside in the cold ‘til we were done, which now that I think about it, was a pretty douchey thing to do, all things considered.

  
Different times. And of course, B.O. meaning Before Ocean. No way I’d do something like that these days. The smarter move’s to blackhat their website, anyway.  
Speaking of black hats, I have plenty living in different hat-habitats around the room; on doorknobs, lampshades, underneath a half-dozen hoodies and jackets hanging off the hooks on the back of the door, stuffed into drawers with my socks and pants but today’s special, so I’m breaking out my favourite. This black bowler hat takes pride of place, perched on the head of my favourite old teddy, oh so Malcolm McDowell-y. I used to have one just like it I wore at concerts and every time I lost it I bought another just like it, in the market, ten pound a pop, a whole succession of them lost to the mists of time now.  
Though maybe the bowler would be laying it on a bit thick. I used to like how people looked at me when I wore it, but nowadays I’m more self-conscious, I think twice.

  
I still love my costumes though. I never thought of them as fancy dress—no way-- that was my real self up there on stage and this buttoned down, quasi- normal individual in the mirror—the one wot doesn’t jump up in front of an audience in nothing but torn up trousers and a bunch of rage against whatever powers are currently screwing us over, this boring, ordinary-ish person, that’s the real disguise, the face I wear to get on in this world as best I can. Keeping the shit disturbing on the DL these days, just taking the occasional flit now and again to remind me it’s still in me somewhere down there. I put the bowler hat in a carrier bag. I’ll wear it for Cammy because it’ll help her find me in the crowd, but I settle for my ordinary cabbie’s flat cap for the trip to Ocean’s school.

  
Last I pick the so-called (by me and no one else) “cool” walking stick from the umbrella-less umbrella stand by the door, not the ugly granny one with rubber feet I got off the NHS after the surgery, even if it does work better. Have to have some standards, even if I’ve let so much else go. I’ve been trying to wean myself off using a walking stick since I had the ankle replacement, but no joy there.

  
It’s clear to me, the replacement’s not working out, like a crap new bandmate, drafted in too quickly to fill in for one of the original members after a spat about “creative differences.” You know the bastard needs to be sacked, but you’re just trying to avoid the pain of inevitable confrontation.

  
Sometimes I’m okay without it, but having it visible keeps me from having stand for ages on the tube. It’s the standing that does me in more than anything else, so whatever’s needed to avoid that, stick included, I’m down with that. I’m travelling far today, all the way out to Heathrow and there will definitely be a lot more walking than I’m used to of late, probably lots of jerking around on the train, as well.

  
The cool stick, is the one with the eightball on top for a handle. It’s not a real full size billiard ball, but it’s close enough in size to look fairly bad-ass, at least in my hopeful opinion. Just don’t ask me to pot the black, not funny.

  
I take one last glance in the mirror and give myself a small swipe with a lipstick. There, preparations to face the public complete.  
"Ocean!  You ready?" I call out to her.  
"Yeah, yeah! You pack the muffins?"   
"Right here."

  
This is my sole concession to domestic life. Every week-end I make a muffin mix so we can have instant breakfasts for the rest of the week. This is about as much forward planning as I go in for on the food front. All I can say is thank the God for school dinners!

  
I put the muffins and juice box in another carrier bag and coffee from the machine in my travel mug and I’m ready to go. Ocean pulls on her navy coat, the new one with the little wood dongle thingies on it. Underneath she’s kitted out in her school uniform; ugly gray skirt, scratchy gray tights, dorky maroon blazer with school logo and scuffed black shoes from Primark. If Sy could see what our daughter was wearing now he’d probably bust a gut laughing.

  
I feel for the kids these days, laboring under enforced sartorial conformity at such a young age. Bad enough they’ll probably have to wear some sort of daft uniform the rest of their lives as adults whether their prisoners in the clink, working for Asda or bank shmucks in the City. I only hope this early exposure to pointless suppression of wardrobe choice instills in her a lingering distaste for authority.

  
Down the evil stairs we go and now we’re in the cold, locking up at the front door. Ocean grabs my stick and looks into the depths of the eight ball like she’s prognosticating the future.

  
“Oh wait…” Ocean rolls her eyes back and puts a hand to her head, acting all theatrical. “There’s- There’s a transmission coming in via this oversized sonic screwdriver—“

  
I really don’t have patience for the outer space séance act today, but Ocean will be Ocean. I finish locking up the door and head up the street towards the bus stop.  
“Major Tom demands contact,” she intones behind me. “He has someone wants to speak to you…”  
“Well, you can tell Major Tom from me that I love him, but to sod off and let us get to school already, okay?”  
“Oooooh, it’s not Major Tom, it’s—it’s City, calling us from the realm of Anubis, Egyptian king of the underworld and land of the dead!”  
I turn back, well pissed. “Ocean, that’s not funny. Stop talking shite! City’s not dead.”  
She opens her eyes and they’re all wide and guileless. “And how do you know that?”  
“Because- Because…” She’s right I don’t actually know.

  
“How?”  
“Because, I’d just know, okay?” I say as we continue on to the bus stop and I grab back my walking stick. I am getting distinctly uncomfortable here and wish she’d just shut up about City already. No need to air dirty laundry in public, so I prepare to spread some grade A bull, ‘cause I want this convo to end, full stop. “Listen, when you’ve been in a band like the Fuck-Ups you have this— this sense, like a connection to everyone else that was ever in the band. It’s like the force, like this energy between us all. When one of us is sick or unhappy or feeling really brilliant, all the rest of us can feel it. Just like sometimes I can feel if there’s something wrong with you or you’re really happy or something even when you’re not right here beside me.”

“Seriously?”

  
“Absolutely.”

“You didn’t kill her or anything though, right?” she says with a weak little smile.

Fuck, so that’s what’s really bothering her. And now my soul is sinking down to the depths of despair like a submersible in the Mariana Trench.

“Ocean, don’t be bloody ridiculous. You really think I’d ever hurt anyone on purpose?”

“No, course not. I’m just joking.”

“It’s not funny. You know there’s a difference between saying you’re going to kill someone ‘cause you’re angry and actually killing someone!”

“I know. Still, do you ever wonder what happened after she left?”

“I don’t have to wonder, I know. She went down the pub, drank herself stupid, then buggered off back to Sheffield. And as long as she stays the fuck away I don’t bloody well care, all right?”

“I know, but that day, ‘fore she left, she kept saying she wanted to talk to you and I said you was sleeping, that you get cranky when people wake you up and she told me—“

I groaned. If only Ocean let City wake me, maybe that last, terrible row with Jams could’ve been avoided. I had to fight with anyone, it should of been City. The busted leg might’ve been worth it for the pleasure of punching the shit out of her smug little face.

“I keep wondering like, about what she wanted to say—“

“Don’t. Why do you care what that slag says? She didn’t do enough to screw up our lives the last time she was here? You want me back in the hospital again?”

Ocean looks a little frightened now. Good, maybe it’ll make her stop talking about the whole City thing.

“Trust me, Ocean, I’ve known that cunt since before you were born and you only hear from City when she’s skint and needs money. Either that or she decides she wants to amuse herself by screwing up your life. Her last visit so fucking brilliant, you’re eager for a repeat? Because you know this fucking leg of mine still’s not done sending me it’s regards, all right?”

Yup, playing the “poor injured Mum” card. Stooping pretty low today Ionee, if I do say so myself.

But not as low as some. Not as low as City. There are people in this world who’re just bad news, people who corrupt every good thing they touch. I used to think maybe I was someone like that, and it’s true I’ve had my share of people’s lives I’ve inadvertently messed up, Ocean’s included, but I’m a rank amateur next to the likes of City.

If I had a time travelling Delorean like Marty McFly I’d go back to that first time I saw her in college, sitting next to Jams in the café, tapping away with those drumsticks like she was oh-so-cool on the edge of the table at St. Martin’s and I’d tell my younger self to get the fuck out of there.

Run away, turn away, run away, like that kid in the Bronski Beat song and don’t look back. It’s all her fault about Sy and the band and what happened to Jams and me after. If she was here right now I would tear her apart with my bare hands, yeah, I’d make her fucking “wake up from history” like Jesus Jones. But I don’t do anything, just seething inside, standing there with Ocean, waiting for the bloody bus like the rest of these voiceless sardines, crammed into the bus shelter, faces fishlike and dumb.

“Mum?”

I blow on my hands in their fingerless striped gloves, not the most practical for February, and try to think of something to say that doesn’t make me seem like a murdering psycho. "Cold out today, innit?"

“Yeah,” she answers sadly and I look over at her and now Ocean just looks friggin’ miserable and depressed. Makes me feel like a fucking monster. I tell you, I’m just trying to protect her, to make her understand the danger. Maybe I go overboard, I don’t know.

And now I’m getting down again myself. Things a’been so fucking depressing lately. Too much time on my jack jones knocking about in me own head. This despite the pain meds and shit. God damn. I look up, because suddenly I feel like I’m going to cry and the sunlight hits me like an arrow between the eyes, making my brain hurt.

I have to close my eyes for a second. Shut it all out. Sometimes it seems the whole world hates me, I swear, but it’s this shit with Ocean’s that’s really doing my nut.

I thought she was done with this crap, but now I know she’ll never be free from it.

Oh my little Ocean, how could this happen? That cunt City planted this awful idea inside you like some fucking fungal spore and it’s been growing in the dark, proliferating, budding, taking over all this time. I’ll never be the same in your eyes again, no matter what happens. Been a fool to think we could just rock on through our lives and leave all that shit in the past. No matter how much I’ve tried to protect you from it all, it was always there, in City’s twisted mind, lying in wait to engulf you, ambush you when the time was right.

And the worst isn’t even that. If I knew, if I really knew who was right—if it was City or Jams, who I could say for sure spoke the truth about what happened-- then it wouldn’t be so bad. But I still don’t know and there it is again, that fucking question mark at the centre of it all, at the centre of my whole damned life for the past eight years. My God, will it never be over? How much can one person stand?

I see City’s face floating up at me from the dark pools of my nightmare mind and I really do want to kill her, smash her up like glass with a hammer. Everything I ever had, she tried to take from me! Sy first and then, not happy with that, coming back here like a fucking ghost and mucking my life up some more, telling that shit to Ocean, and still that wasn’t enough; She had to leave me fucking crippled and Jams run off. Had to go and hurt Ocean, my precious Ocean, wot never did anything wrong to anyone, innocent Ocean, who deserves so much more than this shitty life I give her. Little Ocean going to a crap school with crap teachers, wearing crap clothes, living in a crap flat with me, her crap--

“Mum?” says Ocean worriedly and I realize the bus has come without me even noticing, I’m that deep inside my own thoughts, feeling like the world’s worst human being and it’s not even nine o’clock yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> XXXX  
> The name of this chapter is a quote from the Clash's song "Know Your Rights"  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e004RHFIxLg


	7. Ocean: Suffragette City

OCEAN ISRALS  
(London, UK)

 

6\. “SO DON’T LEAN ON ME MUM CAN YOU CAN’T AFFORD THE CHICKEN, DOWN AT SUFFRAGETTE CITY!”

On the bus, I stand beside Mum holding tight to the pole. Everybody looks grumpy and nobody’ll give her a seat, even if she’s for-real disabled which is a word I’m not supposed to call her, but she is anyway. I’m trying to be happy about seeing Aunt Cammy tonight and listen to Mum chatting up the bus driver and making jokes, but all the way there I was thinking of summer school and spending the whole summer with stupid Mrs. No-imagination Oberika or someone equally awful. Mum got me out of summer school last year, but I don’t think she’d be able to do it again the same way. It was like magic that only worked once.

  
Even if I hate the bus, I secretly hope it takes forever and we never arrive at school. I don’t want to go and have Mrs. Oberika again. I swear she hates me. She thinks I’m a bad kid, cause I don’t work hard and I read comics under my desk during math class because it’s boring and I like to draw pictures on my notebook covers to make them more interesting, but I’m not bad. Seriously, I don’t ever hurt or tease anybody, not like some of them others. I lose things and forget things and am not so organized and take a long time to get ready to go out to playtime and forget what time to come in, but it’s not because I’m trying to do it on purpose. I really am trying to be on time, only they don’t believe me! That and they say I swear too much. Even if mum told me not to do it at school, it’s easy to forget. I don’t know why they made such a big deal out of it anyway. They’re just words after all. I mean they won’t even let you say “stupid” in school and I’m not talking about calling a person stupid, which is horrid for real, but calling like a chair or a table or a book stupid. Seriously, they act like that is some kind of awful thing here, which is stupider than saying stupid in the first place. Other things? Okay, sometimes I run the wrong way in PE or go to school in my trainers instead of the black shoes, but the black shoes are ugly, even Mum says they remind her of “orthopedic footwear” whatever that is and my Converse are nicer because they have sparkle laces. It’s not like I’m hurting anyone. In secret I think maybe I just make the teachers’ jobs hard and that’s why they don’t like me. It’s easier if all the kids just follow the rules, don’t ask any questions, saves time, even if you reckon the rules are stupid.

  
One time I spent all of playtime looking at a rainbow puddle oil thingy on the playground and thought up a story about it, like how it was a portal to another dimension to where the time lords live and didn’t hear when Mrs. Oberika called us to queue up and come inside. Then she came out at quarter past absolutely livid. She made me cry, shouting at me, saying I was hiding from her on purpose when everyone else went in. It wasn’t true, I was out in the open the whole time, only she didn’t see! I was in my other world pretending to be Dr. Who. So of course I didn’t hear her! It’s her job to make sure we’re all in class anyway. It’s not my fault she’s rubbish at her job!

Anyway, Mum says grown-ups should know not to hit or yell at kids because all it teaches kids is being louder and stronger and bigger makes you right and that’s not really true. I wish more grown-ups knew that.

See stuff like that, you can see that sometimes Mum really does understand. Sometimes she looks at my homework with me and we’d “commiserate,” which was last week’s extra-points spelling word which I didn’t get.

It means to talk smack together about something you both agree is tripping balls.

“No wonder you’re not doing well,” Mum would say. “This is boring as hell. Anybody were to give this to me I’d not be able to concentrate on it either!”  
But sometimes she’d be on the teacher’s side and it was all of them ganging up on me, saying I was bad. Two weeks ago it was one of those times. They called Mum into school for a talk about me after class on Friday. She never used to get pissed when teachers complained about me before. She used to have a sense of humour about these things, but she’s changed.

She come to pick me up at the end of the day outside like usual and we was supposed to go up to the office for the meeting, but then right in the playground with a few of the other kids still around she started talking about how it would probably be about them wanting me to go to summer school again. Like how can they know I’ll need summer school? It’s only February. Don’t I have loads of time to learn more stuff? Maybe I’ll learn everything by that time and they’ll be wrong about me not getting things. They probably just want to scare her, that’s all. Still Mum was getting upset and it was in front of other kids!  
“I don’t care,” I tellt her off. “I been to summer school before. It’s not so bad.” This wasn’t just me talking out of me arse, it really is pretty much like camp. I got to go to a different school with nicer kids and play on this brilliant climbing frame that went almost up to the sky when I was there a few years ago, but now Mum says they’re having it at a different school.

“I was hoping for a break this summer. The new summer school placement is so far away. Remember the centre where you took swimming lessons? It’s at the same place.”

I remembered the swimming lessons place. Mum was right, it was far away. We’d have to take the bus to Kilburn and then switch over which takes ages. Suddenly, I thought of Mum standing on the bus with me for twenty minutes, then at the bus stop, where she couldn’t even sit down because there aren’t any real seats, just that stupid, orangey-red ledge thingy with the slippery anti-climb paint. Then we’d have to go on the other bus for another 22 minutes and then a five minute walk to the school and that’s all when there’s not a lot of traffic. And then, after all that, Mum having to taking another bus and two different underground lines back to Camdentown to go work at the shop. I could see her in my mind, limping up all the steps to Kentish Town Road exit, because the station was old and there was no escalator or lift or anything, just a load of steps and they got slippery in the rain.

Suddenly, I wasn’t feeling so chuffed about going to summer school. I had that feeling inside I get sometimes like a ship sinking down to the bottom of the sea.  
“But it’s just me Maths!” I protested as I kicked a stone. “I’m tops in Language Arts!”

“Me Maths?” she mimicked. “Tops in Language Arts, eh?”

“My maths! I know how to say it right! Stop taking the piss!” All my days, why is she being so mean to me today? As if this is easy on me, as well!

“You think I’m bad? Try saying like or innit around your Zaydie some time. You have no idea and don’t say ‘taking the piss’ at school!”

“Yeah, so like when are we going to see Bubbie and Zaydie again anyway? We’ve not been to Canada for ages and last time they was here was—“

“Look,” she said, not even bothering to try to answer the question about Bubbie and Zaydie, “I’m obviously going to the meeting with Mrs. Oberika and Mr. Walters anyway. You might as well tell me if there’s any other amazing news they’ll feel like sharing with me other than your Maths mark. Is there some lengthy litany of sins I should know about before I go into the lion’s den? Come on luv, fess up.”

“Nuffink!” I protest. “There’s nothing.”

I couldn’t wait to see Aunt Cammy, I wish she’d talk about that, but Mum kept on talking shite about stupid summer school.

“Uh-huh. Last chance Ocean,” she pointed her stick at me, wiggling the handle annoyingly in my face. “Come on, tell the magic eightball.”

“Okay, okay okay,” I said just to get this convo over with, keep the other kids from noticing us. “Like maybe there’s a few little things.”

Stupid magic eight ball. So I talked about some other time I got in trouble instead. Big mistake. By the time we were going up the stairs to the inside of the school she was already straight whinging about the stuff I told her.

“Seriously Ocean? What do you have to muck about at school all the time? You know I’ve been unwell. But you never think of me or anyone else, do you?”  
I could feel the tears starting to prick at the insides of my eyelids. “That’s not true!” I exclaimed. “I do think of you!”

“Well, you have a funny way of fooking showing it!” she said, voice going angry. I don’t like when she talks like that. She sounds like the other mum and dads and they’re all berks, who act like they’re better than they’re kids all the time, but then their kids are berks too, so I guess they’re right.

A TA walked by just as she said it and stared at us. I wish I could fade into the jungle habitat mural by the stairs and hide in the green foliage with the spotted leopard on the wall.

This was not what I wanted to hear. Mum was making me nervous. I tried to tell myself it was just cause her ankle was hurting her, but then I couldn’t really feel bad for her, because it was her fault after all, wasn’t it? I mean her leg wouldn’t’ve got messed up again if she’d not tried to stir things up with Uncle Jams.

Call yourself a fucking grown-up? I thought at her back as I watched her go up the stairs. Fucking behave like one then! She looked stupid and awkward and made me mad. Stupid limpy Mum, getting in a fight. Wasn’t she the one always telling me “use your words?” So was that all rubbish or what? And anyways nothing would’ve been messed up in the first place if she’d just paid attention to the road all those years back. Hey, maybe then I’d even still have a dad!

My face got hot. What were these mean, horrid thoughts taking me over? I never used to think that way! Never never never! But that was before City told me— City bloody well messed with my head, innit? That’s what it was, making me think like that. Sometimes I think I hate her as much as Mum does. I wish she never came to our house. Then Jams and Mum wouldn’t have had a row and Jams wouldn’t have left and Mum’s leg wouldn’t be poorly. And I wouldn’t have this head full of awful stupid thoughts and lies I can’t make go away. Or at least what I think are lies. I just wish I could know, one way or another.

But Mum’s no help. Look, I know she’s my Mum and I shouldn’t think about her that way, but sometimes she’s just so frustrating I want to shake her! Look at the state of her! Dressed in her most normal clothes and she still looks like a fucking punker from the Lock! And Ms. Oberika and Mr. Walters are so straight and I know they don’t like her. Last time we had a meeting Mum was late and they were all cross and I think Mum wanted to row, but didn’t out of respect for me and that. I wondered if Mrs. Oberika’ll let spill about my Dr. Who story. All my days, I hope not. Mum’s going to be mad. Me talking about Dad and the stuff about her hacking the wifi downstairs and taking stuff from the market. I didn’t really think too hard about them reading it. Maybe doing that stuff we done that I wrote about is illegal. Maybe Mrs. Oberika and the head teacher are going to have the filth take us to jail. I don’t want to go to jail, but I won’t grass on me Mum, they’ll have to torture me first! Except, I think maybe I’d crack. I’m not really hard, even I pretend sometimes. I’m actually just a marshmallow, like Mum says she is.

What I’m most scared of is this: What if they wrote about her to social services? Don’t laugh, ‘cause that actually happened with Rashid in year two, who smelled like pee and hit people alla time with rocks and the twins Vanessa and Billie in year three, them wot never talked and didn’t know how to use crayons, whose dad kept loads of Staffies at home and then Billie were in hospital ‘cause one bit her onna face and then they got sent to another family. When I told Mum she got this weird expression on her face and said how that sort of thing didn’t happen to kids at Ava and Aryeh’s private school in Toronto, but how does she know anyway?

Point is, I don’t want to go to another family, (well most of the time anyway). I like me Mum, (most of the time) even if I get mad about her and wish she could makes\ some more money and fix her leg already.

I wondered if the teachers were going to send me to Mr. Shaloub the psychologist again, like they did for the learning disabilities test. I liked him, he smelled nice like satsumas. But I didn’t want them to tell Mum or Mr. Shaloub about my story. I don’t know why I wrote it. I don’t usually write stuff about my real life. I mean what’s the point if it’s just real stuff? I want to pretend I’m someone with a cool life, like I’m a be when I’m older, but sometimes, it’s like I just got to get stuff out of my head, innit?

Anyway, it wasn’t really about real life or my dad in the beginning. It was just about Dr. Who and then it got all complicated and some other stuff came out. Look, I’m not mental, I know it’s pretend. It’s just the adults that get confused and think I can’t tell the difference because they don’t have any imagination.

And then I had a bad thought, like what if they asked me to tell Mr. Shaloub what City said? What if they somehow squeezed it out of me, like under pressure or something?

City told me things about Mum—well, they were bad, bad things. Stuff I’m not supposed to know. All swirling around in my brain making me feel weird and yucky when I think about them. I fucking hate City. Mum’s right. She’s evil, City is. I know she can’t be right. I think about it, what she said about my Mum and my Dad and it’s like I can’t catch my breath, just gasping and gasping and I want to cry and the problem is… the problem is… the problem is Mum doesn’t have any other answers. I asked her to explain, tell me something different’n what City said, but she just says she doesn’t remember! Seriously, like what the fuck? How do you forget something like that? Look, if any of that stuff happened to me I’d remember!

Maybe she’s not telling the truth about not remembering. But how would that work anyway, forgetting something like that? It’s not like forgetting a spelling test or leaving your maths at home. Which makes me think maybe she’s lying. Except I don’t want to think that, not about Mum.

  
Okay then, other option, maybe it’s just easier for her not to talk about it. Too disturbing. I mean who can tell with grown-ups? They never say what they really mean, except I used to think Mum was different, that she tellt the truth. I used to think she wouldn’t be like that, not with me anyway.

  
But all I want to do with these stupid secrets is spew them out, tell everybody, even at school, like the bad truths are going to explode out of me against my will any second, like a pot ready to boil and everybody will find out everything anyway. It’s just the more a thing’s supposed to be a secret, the more I just got to talk about it. Like about what happened to Uncle Jams in New Orleans. It’s like when Mum says “don’t tell Bubbie,” and I wasn’t even thinking about telling her, but then alla sudden I feel like that’s all I can think about, just because Mum said that.

  
Sometimes, eating snack together, me and Jams, I wanted to ask him so bad about his arm and his neck and I’d think up the questions in my mind about what really happened, like how I’d say it and everything, but then I’d open my mouth and look at his face and I just couldn’t. I just couldn’t, you know? Even though he’s a grown-up, Jams could be a like a kid sometimes, too, like needing Mum to take care of him and that, even if Mum needed him to take care of me sometimes. He could cry like a kid too, all of a sudden. He cried at “Finding Nemo” at the part where all the baby fish eggs die, like every time and not just at that.  
There were times since he’d come live with us that he had to go to the hospital to get special tablets and he’d be all doped up and sad when he come back. This one time he got in a bad way and run off and Mum had to find him and it took a whole day and it turned out he’d gone to the Cutty Sark, that boat in Greenwich for some reason, and was upset and crying because it was closed for repairs and it’d been burnt down. I didn’t want to be the one making him feel like he had to go hide again. I wanted Uncle Jams to be happy. Most of all I wanted him to come back to us, to live in Parklife like he used to because he was fun and now I have to do all his jobs and do the dishes, which blows.

  
I had to help Mum the rest of the way with the stairs. She kept on squeezing my hand like she’d break my thumb off. She had to half hop sometimes, because she couldn’t put much weight on her bad foot and it hurt me every time she did it, but she didn’t even care. Even though I yelled “Ow!” she just told me to pipe down. I couldn’t let go though, because then she’d take a tumble and I could see she was scared of that, which was just making her twist my hand even tighter.  
“Mum! Stop holding me so tight!” I hissed at her.

  
“All right, sorry Ocean. Here, give me your shoulder,” she said and leaned on me that way which was almost as uncomfortable.

  
I looked up and there was this boy named Jayden from my class standing by the stairs, just quietly watching us, probably from the after-care program on loo break, taking his time getting back. Liam, Alfie and Shanice are in the after-care too. Shanice and Liam don’t like me. Jayden doesn’t care one way or another. Alfie plays in my school football league so he’s a mate. I hope Jayden doesn’t say anything about me and Mum to Liam and Shanice. They like to gossip, those two.

  
“Why they’d put the office on the upper floor I’ll never know.” Mum huffed as we made the landing. Now that the stairs were over, she was willing to give me a smile. “Next time we’ll get the lift key.”

“Yeah,” I said. If there is a next time and Liam and Shanice don’t tease me to death about you now that they seen you.

Then I felt bad for thinking that, because Mum’s my Mum and I know she loves me more’n anything and I love her, even if sometimes I get annoyed. It’s not her fault, not really. Jams would always say she’s doing her best, whenever I got mad at her. He’d always stick up for her around me. But where was Jams now? Gone off and left us.

Just like that stupid song he used to play all the time:

_“She’s gone and left me, I don’t know why_   
_That girl she’s crazy, she made me cry…”_

Only Uncle Jams wasn’t a girl, he was a man, but he liked men anyway, just like a girl. At least he would’ve understood about the other kids. He should be here to help Mum, not me.

  
What I really wish they’d do is explain stuff more. “Because I say so” or “it’s the school rules” are crap reason, but I guess no one has the time and there’re too many other kids all asking stuff at the same time, not like at home with Mum. Mum always explains stuff to me about why we’re doing this or why some asshole politician on the telly is saying that. How else do you know if someone’s trying to tell you what to do because it’s something to help you or if they’re just bossing you around because they get off on it or somefing? Anyway that’s what Mum says, always said give people the benefit of the doubt. She says treat people the way you would like to be treated. Unfortunately, seems their mums never told them the same.

  
I knew for real I never do anything Mum says is wrong, but the way the teachers all look at me and their voices and the way they kept repeating the word “concerned” like telling Mum “oh we’re concerned about your daughter” when I know the only thing they’re really concerned about isn’t me at all, it’s just keeping the class quiet and getting through the material so we reach our “targets” and “learning outcomes” and shit and they don’t get in trouble. I think maybe they make Mum feel bad, as well, like she’s doing a rubbish job as a parent because she has weird hair and a shop with a rude name and wasn’t never married to my dad and thinks uniforms and religion and school testing are rubbish and brings me to school late because she takes painkillers at night that make her slow and sleepy in the morning.

  
If they’re so fucking concerned why don’t they do something real to help us? Like not making her come all the way down here after she’s been working all day with a sore leg, yeah?

  
Honestly, they’re about as concerned as those signs inside the doors of the girls’ toilets saying “Are you concerned about this toilet? Talk to the main office if you notice anything suspicious.” I know this because Jasmine read it to me, and then we had a right laugh, because like can you imagine? People feeling all concerned about this poor toilet, who’s all depressed like Marvin the Android because his flusher won’t go or something?

  
Anyways, I’ve explained to Mum, it don’t matter if I can’t carry numbers or shit in Maths because I’m going to be: a) a rock star or b) a Dr. Who actor or c) a Premiere League footballer, preferably a striker. So what do I need to know all that Maths rubbish for? Maybe I’d actually want to do Maths more if they let us do other things more, let’s say if we could play music every day or do more football in PE. But we never get to do any of that stuff I like—only maybe once a month or something for Music or Art. Maths and Language we have to do every day!

  
So here I am sitting, while Mum and Mrs. Oberika and the Deputy Head Teacher Mr. Walters have their stupid conference, with me half listening through the door. You hear nearly everything through these walls, even if you’re trying to concentrate on your “Sarah Jane Adventures #9 The Slitheen Scare Novelization.” Sarah Jane was Dr. Who’s companion a long time ago, and she got her own TV show, but then the real actress who played her got sick and died. I cried when Mum told me. It’s not fair and not just because it was such a good show. Why’s it that everyone I like goes away in the end, just like in that really sad Johnny Cash song?  
Mum says that song is about bad stuff that happens to people on drugs, but I think maybe it’s about something different, all that stuff about people going away and leaving you? At least pretend people never do that. Dr. Who never has to go away, he just regenerates into someone with a new face. I wish my dad and the actress who played Sarah Jane could do that, but I know it’s not real life, that.

  
I listen to what they’re saying. “In some ways your daughter is quite gifted. She has a great, er, imagination—“

“Like you’d even understand what that was, bum-face,” I think at Mrs. Oberika through the wall.

“BUT her academic performance….”

Yeah, there it was again, the return of the “but.” There’s always a “but.” Cammy said it meant the same thing as arse in American. I wondered if they knew that. Probably not, because they are stupid.

They also said something about a “cavalier attitude.” That sounded cool to me, like maybe I rode around like a highwayman stealing rich people’s jewels. Mum once took me to a historical show on Hampstead Heath that this actor friend of hers was in and that’s what it was about. There were real highwaymen there too, in the Cavalier Era, robbing people with flintlock pistols and wearing cool rock star capes like 18th century Adam Ant in the very place where there’s now an ice lollies stand! It’s true, I read it in “Horrible Histories.”

Anyways, when she came out of the room from her talk Mum looked so very small and sad when she looked at me. She was concerned for me. Real concerned, not fake concerned like everyone else and suddenly I was concerned for her, too. Her eyes were red almost like she’d been crying and she was leaning on her stick like a really old person. I reckon her hurt foot had gone all numb like it did sometimes. Once she let me poke it with a fork and she said she didn’t feel anything.

Poor Mum! Stupid too-tall Mrs. Oberika! What right did she have to make Mum look like that? Only it wasn’t just Mrs. Oberika. It was my fault too and it was like my heart was this horrid bouncy ball falling down through my body, into my belly where it sat like a hard little rock for a second, then up again until it was in my throat making me feel like I wanted to throw up all my food and I was worried I’d vomit! Then it passed and I had a thought:

There was something at the bottom of all this with Mum. It wasn’t just her pure whinging. There was something wrong and it was starting to scare me, like maybe there was something really bad going on with her that she wasn’t telling me. I mean she’d got a broken leg, yeah I get it and maybe it would take longer to heal because it was screwed up from before, “mangled in the crash,” like she told someone, all cool and dramatic this one time, but it’s been ages now, like almost a year or something. At first it was getting better, but then it just stopped and now sometimes I think it’s actually getting worse and she keeps taking those tablets that make her sleepy like Uncle Jams and when she’s awake she acts all cross and cranky.

Why isn’t it getting better? Why doesn’t she just go to the doctor and get herself sorted? Or has she already gone and got some kind of horrible news like people on that Holby City hospital show? I lose my breath again and start to get sweaty. I hold Mum’s hand tighter and kind of pray like I learned in Hebrew school, but it doesn’t help, probably because I don’t know the real words.

  
We trudge up the street towards the bus stop near the Harlesden Jubilee clock, Mum nearly tripping as the uneven paving stones catch at the front soles of her Blundstone boots. It would be better for people if we had sidewalks like they have in Canada, all concrete and smooth, not like puzzle pieces of paving stones half of them rising up a few cm off the ground and some not. Mum never stumbled in Canada, except on ice in the winter.

  
I didn’t like that Mum wasn’t trying to row with me. Maybe she was saving it? She just seemed, I dunno—exhausted like maybe she needed a coffee. Or maybe there’s just a point you can get to where you’re so worn out you don’t have any anger in you anymore.

  
Mum without anger? It scared me, her being so knackered she didn’t even have the energy to rant about any of her usual stuff. At least she seemed to revive a bit when we got to Chicken Cottage and had our chicken and chips.

  
With the food in her belly she seemed to get a bit more normal and start talking again which was good. Whenever Mum stops talking it means either something is very wrong or she’s thinking up a song. And she hasn’t done the songwriting thing for ages.

  
“Here is why you’re not doing well in school,” Mum finally said, as we sat eating, waving a chip in my direction. “It’s because you only want to do what you like. You like making up stories and running around the pitch playing football and pretending you’re alien time travellers with your friends on the playground. The rest of the time, shit just bores you to tears, so you check out of whatever subject they’re teaching, just go into your own head, time travelling with Dr. Who or whatever. More interesting there, innit?”

  
I tired to defend myself. “Maybe. Science isn’t so bad. I liked the mini-beasts unit with the insects and that.”

  
“Right,” she said, “but anything else—you just can’t stick it. It’s like you think school’s supposed to be entertainment!”

  
“Isn’t it?” I asked, ploughing a chip through a river of vinegar and ketchup on my tray.

  
“Don’t eat off the tray,” she snapped. “You don’t know what they’ve been cleaning it with?”

  
I hate when she turns into Bubbie and Zydie like that. I rub my chip into the mix a little more just to show her and her one eyebrow does a satisfying little twitch up her forehead.

  
“Ocean, please, would you listen!”

  
“Mum, c’mon, It’s not like I’m going to be a professional Maths person anyway and Character Assembly’s just stupid,” I protest. Silly Mum, doesn’t even know stupid’s supposed to be a bad word.

  
“Look, I get it, okay? You hate people telling you what to do and all it does is make you dig in your heels and not do it, right?”

  
“Right, and that’s why you never tell me what to do. Well, not much, and that’s why you’re the best mum ever!” I try to give her a hug across the table, but she’s on to me.

“Stop trying to butter me up, Ocean, I know those jedi mind tricks, used to do them myself!”

“What mind tricks?” I asked, oh so innocent.

“No, we have to talk about this,” she shook her head and glanced at the clock on the wall. “I let you get away with too much, I do. Just a sec, alright?” She popped her tablets out of the blister packet and chugged them back with a blackcurrant Ribena. Her favourite flavor is grape, but she’d got blackcurrant by mistake. She hates blackcurrant, but she only shrugged, made a face and kept on drinking it when she noticed it was the wrong flavor, too tired to try to exchange it.

“Seriously, it’s rubbish, I didn’t do anything!”

She laughed and it sounded forced and dry. “Baby, when my mum told me that one day I’d see what it felt to get a taste of my own medicine when I had kids of my own, she was well right. Cat’s in the cradle, definitely.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means I was kind of like you, when I was your age.”

“You were?”

“Yeah. Didn’t give a shite about anything at school I didn’t find interesting.”

“But you went to St. Martin’s art college, right? So you couldn’t have been too bad at it.”

“I was good at art, yeah. I went to a sixth form arts college where my lack of Maths didn’t matter so much.”

“So I’ll just do that, and it’ll be okay then, easy peasy,” I said happily.  
“Really? You think this is okay?

“What?”

“You completely lost the plot? You need Maths, Sciences and all the rest of that shite. You’re going to do ALL your O levels and your GCSEs, miss, just like your mates!”

Psssh…laughs on her, she should know I don’t have any real mates. Not to mention, probably none of them are going to college after sixth form anyway.

“You want to end up like me when you grow up or your poor old dad or do you want to be like Aunt Shoshi and Uncle Matt and Bubbie and Zaydie?”

Was this some sort of trick question? Cause I really didn’t get it. “Like you and Dad of course. Duh. You were rock stars.”

She put her head in her hands.

“Why always with the rock star business? Where do you get that even? Open your eyes! You notice where we live?”

“Parklife just like the song!”

“It’s not really called Parklife! I just called it that because of that song by Blur to make it fun for us and not like we’re living in a shite place above a chip shop.”

“It’s not shite, Mum! NW2, represent!”

“What does that even mean?”

“Like a post code gang like on the news, innit?”

Mum rubbed her forehead with her hand leaving a shiny trail of chip grease behind. “Baby, if I was a real rockstar do you think we’d be living above a chip shop with no front or back garden for you to play in and too many randos in violation of every council law from just about ever, living on the floor below us? We live there ‘cause everywhere else with enough space was just too dear. That’s the reason.”

Maybe you think it’s weird, but this reason honestly never occurred to me. I thought we lived where we did because it was the coolest address in London! I mean come on! We get fish and chips whenever we want! How brilliant is that?

Anyway, I can’t imagine ever living anywhere else. Park’s Big Bite is just downstairs. All the shopkeepers on the street know are my friends and look out for me. Lots of dry cleaning nearby too, as Mum likes to point out to her friends. Not too far from Camden Market and there’s a big field right close to Willesden Green Station for playing football. I only had some spotty memories of living other places. There’d been so many of them early on and they’d been for such short times that none of them seemed like home the way Parklife did.

“I thought you said ‘In the Lock Up’ was a big hit.”

“For a punk band, for all of two seconds. Not even,” she shrugged. “You have to qualify it, you know? Me and Jams, we’re not who you ought to emulate.” She grabbed my hand and stared into my eyes with a gaze so intense it made me want to laugh just to break it.

“Mum, seriously, come off it.”

“No, you seriously! Listen to me, Ocean, this is not a good way to live. Don’t you want nice clothes like your cousins and a real house with loads of space and a back garden with trees in it and to go to a real overnight camp in the summer?”

“Overnight camp? Nuh-uh. That’s just a sneaky way for parents to ditch their kids for a month.”

“What?”

“Wot? That’s what you told me. And Eva and Aryeh don’t get free fish and chips like we do! Their food is nasty.”

“It’s not, it’s just not dripping in loads of fried grease like the stuff we eat and they don’t need free fish and chips. They can buy as much fish and chips as they want because they can afford it. That’s because their parents have real jobs that actually make money. Doctors, lawyers engineers, financial planners, stock brokers—those are the jobs you should want to do Ocean, something that can give you a real life, where you’re not just scheming and scrambling every month trying to make ends meet, overdrawn on credit, living in this crazy business where you get to 40 and you and everybody you came up with is either broke or sick or crazy or dead.”

“That’s rubbish! You’re not 40!”

“37, whatever.”

“And you and Uncle Jams aren’t sick or crazy or—“

“Ocean, I love your Uncle Jams, but—“

She still loved him? Maybe there’s hope…

“--But, he’s not playing with a full deck. You do not want to go down some of the roads that man has gone down, yeah?”

“You can’t say that! That’s mean!”

“Forget it, all right? Look, when I was your age I wanted to be a rock star, sure. I thought: do what you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life because work will always seem like play. Follow your dreams, reach for the stars. Etcetra etcetra and blah blah blah to every motivational advert. I actually believed that shit, but you see what this business does to you? Grinds you up and spits you out—maybe one out of a thousand actually makes it and you always think that one person is going to be you because you’re special and talented, and it’s supposed to be a meritocracy and all that, but guess what? It’s NOT.”

“But if you’re really good at--“

“No one cares. Honestly, that’s the truth. I know it, I’ve lived it. Been there, done that. It’ll fucking break your heart.”

Jeez, she sounds so old fashion when she says it like that. “Break your heart? Really, Mum? Oh so drama.”

“It’s not drama! I am not kidding, Ocean. Look at me. What do I look like to you?”

What am I supposed to be seeing here? She just looks like she always looks, except now she’s eating some fried chicken and has chicken grease on her cheek. “I dunno, you just look like me Mum.”

She smiled a little at that at last and seemed to soften a bit.

“Uh-huh, and being your Mum and loving you is probably one of the few reasons I’ve survived in tact, or mostly at any rate. I had to keep a level head and not fall apart, just to take care of you properly. It’s ‘cause I love you sweetheart. You helped me survive.”

“Thanks,” I said weakly. I mean what can you say to that?

“Look, I know how you feel, I won’t pretend I don’t sympathize. I used to think that way too, all these classes in school-- maths, social studies, chemistry, religion—rubbish, the lot of it, waste of my time. I knew exactly what I wanted out of life and where my talents lay. All I needed was for the world to get out of the way and let me get on with doing what I do best.”

“So? What’s the problem with that?”

“The problem is, you learn the world never does get out of your way. You think you can bend the system to your will, but it’s been around a lot longer than you and it’s you who ends up bent or broken in the end. Making stuff and sharing it together, stories, music, art, dances, books, films, furniture whatever—that’s what humans are naturally good at ‘cause it’s fun and it makes you feel so good. There’s no high like the high of creation, of expression. That’s why there’s always a surplus of people doing it, even if they’re not making money. That’s why there’s always too much competition. It’s all that stupid shite, the shit that feels so tedious and worthless and annoying and unnatural, like learning to balance a budget and check your inbox and pay bills and get your taxes done and not going into debt and washing the clothes and cleaning the dishes and getting places on time and doing the hoovering and staying fit and cooking healthy fucking meals and counting calories and tidying up your flat and making your bed? That menial robotic, annoying shit that all the boring adults are into, well guess what? That shit’s going to be with you the rest of your life! And you don’t suddenly find it interesting once you’ve grown-up. It’s still boring and stupid as fuck and it just gets bigger. So best get good at that crap now, because honestly, you’re better off learning to play by their rules. Trying to play by your own just gets you fucked over and hurt. And worse yet, ends up hurting the people you love. That’s the truth. Sucks, but there it is.”

I stared at her, her just sitting there drinking her Ribena like a cunt who wasn’t my Mum.

What the fuck was this?

There she was, just sitting there talking UTTER CRAP.

Seriously, who the FUCK was this person?

I know Mum better than anyone else. I know telling her the truth shouldn’t make her mad. Speak truth to power, right?

“Mum, that’s complete and utter shite.”

“’Scuse me?”

“It’s rubbish. You think I rather’d live with Aunt Shoshi and Uncle Mark? You’s serious?”

“Wot?”

“You really believe that how come you’re still with the punk shop and session gigs and that? Why don’t you just bin it all and go back to uni to be a lawyer and dye your hair something normal?”

“I dunno.”

“Sure you do, it’s cause you don’t really want to.”

“You’re right, but we’re talking about you here. Anyway, I’m too old to go back to school and do all that.”

“Bullshit. You don’t want to do it, because you think it’d suck.”

“No, because I would suck at it. It’s not the same thing.”

“Here’s what I don’t get, okay?” She was acting all grown-up now, pretending to be sensible and shit, only I knew she wasn’t being sensible at all and it was just making me cross. “Why’d you try to make me do something you wouldn’t do yourself, yeah?”

“Because, I want something better for you. Ocean, I want you to have a good life. I don’t want you to fuck up and blow your chances like I have. You’re smart, sweetie, it doesn’t matter if you get perfect on all your reports or that, I know it. I always known it. Those books I used to read you, you know, ‘Brown Bear Brown Bear’ and Dr. Seuss and that. You memorized them all! Everything you remember, even things I don’t. I’ve never known anyone with a memory like that. You take everything in and you could do anything you set your mind to if you wanted.”

Except read at my farking year level, but I didn’t say that.

“Anything? What if I wanted to poo gold?”

“Well, you’d figure out a way to do that too. You’re just that smart.” She smiled and reached over to hold my hand and I closed my eyes, happy to feel her hands on mine relaxing me, the calluses on her fingertips from the places where they hit the guitar strings, the one on her left palm from where it held her stick. She was still my Mum. Of course she was. She loved me so much, it was like energy, pulsing through our hands together.  
But it still didn’t mean I’d let her get away with slagging herself off and talking rubbish.

  
“It’s still crap, what you said before,” I told Mum. “You’re smart, too. I know you are and I know you can’t do something if your heart isn’t really in it. You have to love something. Not like all these daft idiots running around where it doesn’t matter what job they do, because they don’t really love anything so strong, not the way you love music and being all punk and revolution and shit. Remember that song you guys had?”

  
“We had a lot of rubbish songs.”  
“They aren’t rubbish!” I telt her and sang her the song about the colours. My second favourite after “In the Lock Up” from the album of the same name.

People with no bright colours in their soul,  
no emotion they can’t control  
Pale colours, dash the fire  
and you’re satisfied, oh so satisfied with that safety kind of life  
so satisfied, wish I was satisfied, with all that and screw the strife

I think I flubbed some of the words, but I knew she had to hear it because I think she forgot now what it was all about. I don’t take credit for figuring out the meaning, she’s explained it to me more than once. I don’t know how she could forget, but I guess she need reminding.  
“Uh-huh. Sounds familiar, bit cocky though. The scansion’s off too. Now wot was it called?” She tapped her foot to the beat. “Ah yeah, Bright Colours, innit?”  
“Really?”  
“What?”  
“It’s ‘Satisfied.’”  
“With what?”  
“No, Satisfied’s the name of the song.”

  
“Really? A bit Rolling Stones of us don’tcha think?”  
“Jeez Mum, how can you not remember the song titles? That’s so lame. All my days, there’re only ten of them. You forget everyfing!”  
“Lame and forgets everything. Well, I guess that’s me to a T. Thanks a bunch.”  
And then, oh fuck, then she started to CRY.

  
Shit, I couldn’t, I couldn’t remember when I ever made Mum cry. Sometimes I forgot she could. Like, when I was little once I think I asked her whether grown-ups ever cried because I never saw her.

  
Okay, so yeah, maybe I was a little harsh. I probably shouldn’t’ve used the “L” word. It’s easy to forget that “lame” really means someone wot has trouble walking. It’s like saying something is “gay” or “retarded.” You don’t really think about it meaning a bad thing, it’s just another way to say something sucks, but then you really think about it and it’s not very nice to people who’re like that in real life.

  
Or maybe it was actually me saying she forgets everything that made her cry.

  
She rubbed the tears away with a napkin. “Sometimes…baby, there’s so many things I forget.” She fingered the skinny scar line that went from above her ear, through her eyebrow, all the way up into her hair. Most of the time you can’t see the whole thing, only the part where it goes through her eyebrow and breaks up the little hairs there. Some black kids I know from school have that done on purpose to their eyebrows along with stars or swirls shaved into their head, only none of it’s there forever, like with Mum. I think it’s brilliant, that Mum just has that naturally, but she doesn’t.

  
Sometimes, under the right lights you can see the whole thing. Sixty-eight stitches Mum told me once. It’s the same colour as the rest of her skin, only just a little bit raised up, so what you’d notice wouldn’t be the thing itself, just the little bit of shadow it throws. Or maybe that eyebrow, the right one, doesn’t move much when the other one goes up, so she looks kind of like she’s thinking something’s weird or funny or sort of going amazedly “what the fuck?” all the time, even when she’s not, or maybe she really is thinking that all the time, who knows?

  
“Word for word. I don’t even remember it that well. Jeez, Ocean, you’re something. Where’d I find you? Did you come with the bagels?” She gave me a little cuddle. “But I remember writing it, now that you remind me. It’s not like I can’t trace it, not like the other thing…”

  
“What other thing?” Part of me wanted her to talk about it, the crash, like, maybe if she told me finally, what really happened all the weird feelings and stuff City told me would go away. But the words just hung there and she didn’t say anything.

  
“Sorry I called you lame,” I said finally, disappointed.  
“At least it’s true, innit?” she laughed shakily and shrugged. “I been called worse anyway, don’t matter.”  
But I could still tell, she was pleased I apologized. “Sometimes I forget things too. I forgot my money for school dinners Monday. It’s no big deal.”  
“I think-- I think, I’m just tired. Like really really knackered more than I ever been in my life. I think I just need a little more sleep, that’s all.”  
But I just couldn’t stop, I was on a roll, taking up a role, like those games we played in drama workshop with Mr. Oh. Suddenly I was the mum, giving her advice. But it was strange, because it was her own advice, given to me at a different time and now I was telling it back to her, reminding her of what she already knew, but maybe just forgot.

  
“You’re always going on and on about how you hate people acting like they are what they’re not. Fronting. Not being real. And now you’re acting like what you’re not and you’re telling me to be that way, too? What’s that about? It’s just weird, you know? You’re being weird. Is there something, I don’t know, something going on? Come on, Mum, what’s wrong? What’s wrong with you? Are you sick? You can tell me you know, ‘cause I’m your daughter. I won’t tell anyone I promise, else you can take my Vinyl Pop TARDIS away. I promise, promise, promise!”

  
Mum’s eyes got very big all of a sudden. I wondered if I’d made her mad. But I was real concerned, not fake concerned like the people at school and I loved her and she seemed so sad for so long.

  
“What’s wrong?” she said quietly, like she didn’t know herself. She looked down at the eight ball at the top of her stick as if it could answer back. If it worked like the magic 8 ball she had at the store did, maybe there would be that little blue triangle floating up if she shook it saying “Try Again.”

  
“I know, I haven’t been myself lately. I’ve been trying my best, but…”  
“Why does your foot still hurt you all the time?” I kept on. “Why are you still wearing that brace thingy? Alfie, you know, at my school, he said his big brother broke his leg last year, and he only had a cast for a month and then it was gone and he could walk fine again, just like before. What’s really wrong with you?”  
“Some people just heal faster than others, innit?”

  
“That what the doctors told you? Because if they did, well then it’s wrong. It shouldn’t take this long. Seriously! Mum, what if—what if it’s like that story from Canadian Heroes?” I asked, my voice from trembling, because this is what I’m really scared of.

  
“Canadian Heroes?” The eyebrow went up. “What the hell’re you talking about?”

  
So I should explain about “Canadian Heroes--” It was part of the “Emerging Readers” boxed set Bubbie sent Mum for me for Chanukah because she heard I was a little behind with my reading and maybe dyslexic, as well. Some of the books were fiction and some were nonfiction. “Canadian Heroes” was a nonfiction book about people who lived in Canada that no one in the UK knew about who did heroic stuff.

  
One of the stories was about this teenage guy named Terry Fox and his leg kept hurting and then they found out he had cancer in it and then they had to take it off with surgery and then he got a fake leg and then he decided to raise money for cancer people by running through most of Canada. So then he ran through Canada and raised loads of money for cancer and I thought that’s where the story was going to end with him having lost his leg, which was bad, but then raising all that money and making all the cancer people better which was good, so that it all evened out in the end and there was a happy ending.

  
But that’s not what happened. No, see what happened was that at the cancer came back and went all through Terry Fox’s body and he never finished running all across Canada and then he just died! Yes, that’s actually what really happened! I can’t believe that’s a story for kids “six years and up” like it says on the cover because it was the scariest, saddest story I ever read. Much much much more scarier than “Coraline” by Neil Gaiman, because everyone knows “Coraline” is pretend, but the Terry Fox story is real.

  
I had nightmares about the Terry Fox story. Sometimes in the nightmares it was the same plot as the story I read, but instead it was happening to my mum or even to me! Sometimes I wake up screaming because I have night terrors. I have this superstition a bit that if I say things aloud it will make them real and come true. Still, I told her. I couldn’t keep it inside any longer I was that worried.

  
She sighed and rubbed her brace through her trousers. “I’m sorry to make you so anxious Ocean, I didn’t know you thought—anyway, nothing to worry about on that score. They gave me loads of scans at the hospital and they reckon it’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s the bones in my ankle, they just got kind of weak because of how they were damaged back when you were little. They had to fix them with metal screws andplates back then and I couldn’t walk right for a while. You probably don’t remember.”

I remembered, but I didn’t say.

“Sometimes, when you have that much hardware, the bone around the metal bits gets arthritis-y.”

“What’s that?”

“It just means the bones get weak and crumbly. It happens to a lot of old people.”

“But you’re not that old!”

“I know, but after an injury like that this sort of shit happens a decade or two down the line. The doctors told me it would’ve happened eventually anyway, even if I

didn’t have that spill during that row.”  
“Really?” It sucked for her, but made me feel a little less guilty.

“Yeah.”

“And they couldn’t fix it?”

“We-ell, they tried to. But when they saw on the X-ray that the ankle joint was too messed up to do anything with, so this doctor guy, he decides to scrap it and replace it with a new titanium one.”

“What’s titan- titan-anum?”

“Titanium. It’s a strong metal.”

“What! So now you’re metal inside? Like a Cyberman?”

“Sort of, but like, not an evil one.”

“But I don’t think there are any nice ones!” I was getting a little concerned myself, to be honest. Here they were turning my mum into a cyborg and she seemed totally fine with it. I tried to calm down. “Of course, there were some wot used to be human and were turned into Cybermen in that episode in the alternate universe, but then their emotions came back online and they realized that they’d turned into these weird cyborgs so then they destroyed themselves because they were upset that they’d gone all metally and didn’t look human anymore.”

“Great, that’s great. Nice message to give kids, that.”

I shrugged. “Still liked the episode.” It was one of the Martha episodes. I love Martha because she's a doctor like Bubie and brown- skinned like me.

But I still had a lot of questions. "So like what did they do with your real bone, put it in the dustbin or what?"

"I guess so, why?"

“Like seriously in the dustbin with the plastic spoons and coffee cups and everything?” Uncle Jams took me to get lunch at the hospital when I went to visit Mum. I’d not looked too close in the dustbin when I threw out my leftover dinner, but what if there were actual HUMAN BONES in there? "Urr! Nasty!"

  
“Pro’lly not in that bin, Ocean, be sensible! There’s got to be like a special one for biological hazardous waste or someit.”

  
I sighed, relieved. “But still, that’s not nice! They threw a part of you away and didn’t even ask if you wanted to keep it?”

  
“Ew! Why would I want to do that?”

  
“For cloning, obvs. Like if you wanted to make another you, like on Orphan Black.”

  
“I told you, you can’t watch Orphan Black. Also, I don’t think we’re there quite yet. Besides, what would you do with two of me? One of us watching the shop and the other watching you to make sure you do all your homework? I don’t think you’d like it.”

  
Actually, I thought it might be nice. I’d get loads of attention with two parents, but without having to put up with some crap step-parent who didn’t get me. Best of both worlds, that. “Is it something Bubbie would know about? Cloning? You said she’s working with organ transplants and stem cells, innit? Maybe if we ask her, she can make you a new ankle out of stem cells!" I was quite pleased. This was obvs a brilliant plan and I’d just come up with it on the fly, too.

  
But all Mum said was, “Don’t it mention it to her, okay?” and her voice got fast and nervous. “Don’t want her to think you’re weird or nuffing, yeah?”

  
“Uh, okay,” I shrugged although I was pretty sure Bubbie already reckoned I was plenty weird. “But wait, shouldn’t your ankle be better if they fixed it already?”

“It should, but it’s not.”

“So the titan cyber joint thingy doesn’t work right? How come?”

“I dunno. They told me the artificial joint needs a ‘revision,’” she said with some seriously bitter air quotes.

“Like in school when you practice for your O levels?”

“Nah. It’s like they want to do another operation, but I told ‘em to piss orff. Can’t take twelve weeks off again and that’s that. Satisfied?”

Not exactly. I was sure there was missing something there, but I couldn’t think of how to say it and then suddenly she’s asking me if I want to go for ice cream.

“Ice cream is just what we need to get ourselves outta the Doldrums!"

“Yeah!” I cheered up at that and we were off.

Later on, in bed I was thinking of this program I saw called “Magic Secrets Revealed” and how they talked about this move all stage magicians do, like when they throw a bunch of glittery things in the air and while the audience is looking at that, one ball gets quickly replaced with another and what’s it called again?  
And then I thought about how it doesn’t make sense how I’m not supposed to say anything to Bubie and Zaydie about Mum’s operation. I mean, aren’t we going to have to see them eventually and aren’t they going to notice her rubbish walking? And if the titan cyber-thingy doesn’t work right and Mum can’t take the time off to get it fixed, then what? It just stays like this forever? Or does it get worse? Because she didn’t explain any of that.

  
Wait, what was that magician’s move again? Oh, yeah. Misdirection.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> XXXXX  
> Chapter title from "Suffragette City" by David Bowie  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLnPd7lzT4g


	8. Kevin Oh:  "Young teacher, the subject"

KEVIN OH  
(Cardiff, Wales, UK)

 

7\. “YOUNG TEACHER, THE SUBJECT…”

I’ve always been a rather disobedient person. I can’t help it, it’s just instinct, all you have to do was put a DO NOT WALK sign on some sod and I instantly want to walk on it. I know, I know, an odd character trait for a teacher, but there you go. Tell me “don’t” and that’s it, the longing to do the taboo, the forbidden thing, there it is. Don’t do this, don’t do that, so many rules and plenty with no proper sense behind them. I suppose you could say I understand why kids act the way they do sometimes.   
That’s why I liked having my class. My own private kingdom where the rules my subjects followed (or did not follow as the case often was), are at least ones that made sense, that we vote on altogether, with myself as final arbiter, of course. Any teacher who says he doesn’t get off a bit on the power trip is lying, I’m telling you. And for an actor who excels at improvisational comedy it’s just great, you get a captive audience, who’s not afraid to tell you, (in the rudest terms imaginable too), if you’re bombing. It’s exhausting, but I’d rather do it than anything else, (except acting, of course).   
The unfortunate thing was that as long as I was a teacher at the school I couldn’t have a relationship with Ionee, since she was the parent of one of my students. I was in love with her, but no one else could know. So of course it just made me more into her than I would’ve been otherwise, because it was such a breach of protocol. That added frission of the forbidden, just made it all the more exciting.   
Why did I fall for Ionee other than the taboo factor? She’s beautiful and funny and sexy and frank and so very very alive. There are so many people who’re into music, but how many actually go out there and try to make a go of it? It takes a certain confidence and swagger, believing that you’re somebody worth listening to. It dosen’t hurt that I’ve always been a fan. Seeing a person up there, on that stage, like literally on a pedestal, it changes them in your eyes until they’re almost a character from fiction. When you meet them in person it’s like they're extra vibrant, full of extra colours us ordinary folk aren't privy to. When I think of my emotion for her it’s green in my mind like trees in spring, blooming everywhere. Everything in me sprouting up full of possibility and wild profusion.   
She’s like that, holding back nothing, making you become the same, willing to be who you really are. You never realize how much effort it takes to push all your personality under all the time just to make yourself palatable to other people. How it tires you out, holding yourself back, trying to be what you think everyone else wants.  
You meet someone like that who’s so alive and unrestrained, who is exactly who they are and it’s like you realize that you’ve been living in a world of pastel coloured people your whole life and never knew it like in that song, satisfaction, but not the Rolling Stones one. That’s what Ionee is, a genuine, technicolour person.   
The world excited her. The way she perceived it, I don’t know, it was just different. Funny and silly and sad and so deeply felt. Sometimes its like everything I see and do, it just slides off me, nothing sticking to me, really touching my soul, like I’m all covered up in a vinyl mac inside. All along I wanted something to pierce that barrier, to make me truly feel, something deep and intense, something true and I never realized it until I met her. When I was around her, even just briefly it was like I could catch her vibe, see the world that way. She talked fast and clever and I was fast and clever with her.   
I got to liking everything about her. Not just the big eyes, which anyone would have thought were pretty. No, I even dug the weirder parts, the puffy purple hair, punky outfits, skippy little walk, the whole package. She was good with her daughter too. People don’t expect a guy to notice that, but I’m a teacher. You can tell if a parent respects their kid as a person, you know? Like if the Mum or Dad is aware of them as a distinct human being with opiof their own.  
We could have indulged in secret. It would’ve been naughty and risky and even more amazing just for being against the rules. I was just on the point of asking her, that one week after she came to class to play “In the Lock Up” with us, when I got the call up from the BBC called and you don’t say no to that, not if you’ve been where I’ve been, as a professional actor with no viable career in sight. I wasn’t forced to take up teaching and I love working with the kids, but it was never my plan A.   
The BBC. Holy fuck, I was in. It was an acting gig, they were filming in Cardiff, starting in a week. I thought they completely forgot about me. After all, I auditioned five months ago and never heard back. As it turned out the “ethnic” actor originally hired for the role, bowed out to take a high paying role in “Harold and Kumar go to White Castle 3” or something like that in America. So they went back to the audition tapes and found me, the one Korean guy who’d bothered to try out for the part listed as “35 year old Asian male.” I was 33 and the kind of Asian they were looking for was probably Indian, but I figured, what the hell, close enough. I mean how many other productions are looking for an Asian male with a Manc accent for a supporting role, right?   
As Troy McClure would say, “It’s the part I was born to play baby!”   
So now here I was in the big show. Things were finally beginning at last, ten years out the gate from drama school. For the first time I was making real money acting. Money I could actually survive on. Sure, I missed my students and their funny questions, (Mr. Oh, when people kiss in films is it all done with special effects? That one’s still my favourite), but I missed Ionee more.   
Which is pretty daft when you think about it. I mean we never slept together, never even had a kiss. So what’s up with that? I just liked shooting the shit with her after class, that was all we really had. She was funny and didn’t act all shocked when I said anything “non-teachery.” I mean just because you’re a teacher, it’s like some of these parents just expect you to act perfectly sanitized 24-7, you know?   
But while that sentimental part of me was all busy missing Ionee, I didn’t exactly stop trying to pull. I mean sex is biological, you know? You can’t just turn that need on and off like a switch. It’s like this itch deep inside you sometimes and…well who doesn’t fancy a quick shag now and then? And then that quick shag turns into something else and then something else sort of turns into a relationship-type dealio and then one day you turn around and it’s all Talking Heads—Once in a Lifetime shit—you going “this is not my beautiful wife? Where is that large automobile?” and all that. But I’m sort of getting ahead of meself here so here’s what happened:   
I fell into this sort of relationship with another actress on set. Beth was one of the leads. We did it in her trailer while somewhere in the back of my scheming actor’s mind I thought about the progress of my career and how macking on the head lady might give it a boost. Don’t judge yeah? I’ve been trying to become an actor longer than I’ve been trying to do anything else in this life, including getting with any particular woman, so yeah, there’s that. 

I should’ve been well into her, Beth Mott. She was fit and thin, with long blonde hair and blue eyes, sure the blue eyes were contacts and the blonde hair was dyed, but all my friends thought her a right fox and objectively, yeah, I guess she was. Better than I usually pull at a bar or online, sure. But I still think every time I see her on telly, her eyes are awfully far apart and in the right light she sort of looks like an alien, like her head’s too big for her body.   
It’s sort of like “The Catcher in the Rye,” this book all my teachers at drama school said was supposed to really “speak to me” and that and you know what… I just didn’t get it. It was just hype, pure hype, this paranoid posh kid, gabbling on about how this bloke’s a phony and that bloke’s a phony and he was like seriously having mental health issues. And just because I was young and supposedly disaffected I’m supposed to identify with some entitled paranoid creep? Uh yeah, thanks. And I realized pretty early on, that I was only keeping on with her, because she was “Beth Mott” not because I actually liked her as a person, as someone to talk to. It was like those status games we played in improv, when I was with her my status went up, only I didn’t realize that’s what I was so into, not the girl herself. Even me, I’m not immune to what people say. So maybe that does make me a creep. Look, I’m not the only one.   
Worst of all was some of the bullshit she talked though. “Men are like this, women are like that” theories from this stupid book called “Why Men Love Bitches” that she read. Well, not this man.   
Things about her irritated me that had no right to. I thought of snarky responses to all her comments which I didn’t say and sometimes, when we made love I closed my eyes and she was Ionee in my mind. I always felt guilty about it afterwards, but it’s the truth.  
The weekend I went to visit my little brother Ross at uni and told him about the whole thing was a colossal mistake. I mean, what did I fucking expect? A sympathetic ear? Ha!   
“What the fuck is wrong with you man?” he spluttered over his beer. “You’re living the dream!”  
“Why? Because I’m on TV?”  
“Because you’re dating a celebrity white girl you fucktard!”  
“What the hell?” I gave him a light smack upside the head. “We do not use the word ‘fucktard.’ Plus, you’re Asian yourself! Be proud of your Korean heritage, yeah? What would Oma say, she heard you talking like that?   
He gave me a smug grin. “I could fill the bloody Channel, all the shit Mum doesn’t know about me.”   
God, when had my baby brother turned into such a collossal prick? Time for some proper big brother advice to set the little wanker straight: “Look, saying shit like that is so messed up I don’t even know where to start. We’re all fucking the same inside you know? Trust me, there are plenty of unattractive white girls with nasty personalities out there.”  
“It’s true,” he admitted with a sage nod. “Lots more of them do seem to get really fat and look old earlier. But, hey, they do have big tits.” And he actually reached out his hands and squeezed himself an imaginary pair.   
Wonderful. I put my head down on the bar. How the hell did I forget that since my brother went through puberty he’s been basically a cock on two legs. I don’t know how the hell he’s getting such good marks at Oxford as all he ever seems to think about is pulling girls and occasionally rugby. The really weird thing is my parents have no clue. As far as they’re concerned he’s this awesome pre-med student all focused on his studies who got into that posh private school on scholarship as a kid and is now going to every immigrant parent's wet dream university. I’m the weirdo who decided to go to drama school. This smug wanker is the good son.   
I tried the only logic I thought he’d understand now. “What, you think fanny feels any different whether its one colour or the other?”  
“I don’t know.” He gave me a sly grin. “Does it? Cause you know, I haven’t tried every flavor yet. I've tried vanilla and banana daiquiri and mocha chocolate, but still no--"  
“Oh my God! Look! Women aren’t ice cream!”  
“Oh don’t tell me you don’t lick—  
“All my days, quit while you’re ahead yeah?”   
“Look, all I’m saying is the bird’s on magazines and that, she sounds well posh and is bloody gorgeous and you’re you.”  
“You could be at least more ego stroking, eh?”  
“Ew, ego stroking? Sounds gay. Anyway, you could have that prime piece of arse, but all you’re doing is pining away for who? That punk bird with the half-Paki kid? You oughter have your head examined.”  
I shake my head cringing. Fuck, where does he pick up these expressions? Calling a person a “paki” I mean, sometimes I feel like it still like 1982 around here. That’s what you get, raised in suburban Manchester, the only Korean kids at school. Can’t fucking beat it, right?   
“You’re doing me head in, you are,” he said while eyeing my mobile phone photo of Beth with a look of undisguised lust. Ross never met Ionee. All he knew was that she’d been in the Fuck-Ups, (not that he’d ever heard one of their songs or anything) and had a kid who was in my class. I hadn’t mentioned that she walked with a stick or had purple hair or was Jewish for that matter. I had a feeling that Ross wouldn’t consider these points in her favour. I couldn’t see my mother and father being impressed, either. She was about as far from a nice Korean girl as you could get, but honestly, what did they expect? Send me to Seoul for one summer after secondary and expect me to marry a Korean girl when I can’t even read the language?  
Besides, there’s something just so satisfying about dating someone I know they’d never give the time of day to in real life. Like I said, I’m perverse that way.   
I was back in Cardiff with the evening train, and away from Ross as fast as I could go. Back on set the next day Beth embraced me in her trailer, without emotion. Having a wank by myself in the loo, I came picturing Ionee’s face, her lying down beneath me, springy hair splayed around her face on the pillow, green eyes large and twinkling, one eyebrow cocked sardonically. Somehow, Ross slagging her off only made me want her more.  
I imagined her in my hotel saying “So Kevin? What in the world are you doing here?” with that low sexy rumble in her voice.   
And I’d wrap my arms around her, curling her into me as I whispered, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”  
In the shower imaginary Ionee bit my neck like a vampire and ran her hands down my face, through my hair. The soap slipped down my body, between my thighs, and I imagined it was her hands, those tiny, tiny hands, fingering my arsehole the way she fingered that guitar.  
Afterward she lay down on my hotel bed beside me and we tickled each other. She seemed like the sort who would. I wondered if she had tattoos. She showed me where. There was free porn on the telly, but I fell asleep. My dreams were in quiet and full of sex, melding with the sounds filtering to my subconscious through the speakers, filled with anxiety at being caught in different compromising positions by increasingly more inappropriate people as the night wore on.  
The next day I was shattered. Another gruelling twelve hour shoot, as well. By the time I collapsed on the creaky hotel mattress, I couldn't keep my eyes open even to read the next day's sides. I lay down in the clothes we shot in, but I couldn't help half dreaming of her there beside me, those clever little hands unbuttoning my shirt, tugging off my kicks, pants...  
I imagined Ionee at the end of the day, letting me stroke her hair while she stroked mine. Maybe she'd be tired too. I would make her feel better, take care of her if her foot hurt her. “Let me help you,” I’d say and in private, just between the two of us, she’d be alright with it. I’d massage all the hurt away and she'd take off all her clothes. I wondered what colour were her nipples, brown like mine or pink like Beth’s. Her breasts, I knew were very large, especially for a person who wasn’t very tall. A man could bury himself and fall asleep upon them, like soft, fluffy clouds.   
She was a huggy sort of person, soft and squeezable. Very tactile, hardly British at all that way. She would me in her arms as we fell asleep together.  
Beth wasn’t big on squeezing. Her body was fit, but taunt and hard and smoothly spray-tanned. There was no softness to her. I couldn’t sink into flesh like that. Aterwards Beth would shower and leave for make up as I struggled to pull myself out of post-coital sleep and back to set. We never slept over at each other’s places or made love in our hotel rooms. I didn’t mind.   
Maybe it was strange, to like an imaginary person better than someone who was real, who was there in the flesh, but I preferred my evenings with imaginary Ionee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> XXXXXX  
> The chapter title is a quote form the song "Don't Stand so Close To Me" by the Police  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNIZofPB8ZM


	9. Cammy:  The Passenger

CAMMY HALES  
(Glasgow, Scotland, UK)

8\. THE PASSENGER

I took Air Transat, which is the cheapest airline you can take from Canada to the UK. I was hoping for a straight shot to London, but the cheapest flight was one that ran through Glasgow, with a two hour wait for the connection.  
Glasgow airport looks pretty much like every other airport you’ve ever seen, but to me, right then, it seems pretty fucking fantastic. I grabbed my “carry-on luggage,” an overstuffed backpack on wheels by the handle and made my way out of the gate area. I tried to get the lopsided bag to roll, but only succeeding in dragging it along scraping against the floor. This one star-covered Dickies backpack on wheels contains all my most important worldly possessions; my computer, camera, songwriting book, Nintendo DS, wallet, ipod, extra headphones, novel, lipsticks, maxi pads and important medicines, cellphone and passport and a folder with my letter from the teaching agency for the customs officials saying I had a job waiting for me in London so I could come to the country. The whole business was impossibly heavy.   
At least I was able to check the hockey bag with all my clothes and shoes inside before I boarded. I wasn’t concerned about it getting lost, I was just excited, grooving on this whole adventure, adrenalin surging through my veins and stimulating new sights zipping from eyes to brain, but I couldn’t help it. I just felt so alive. Here I was! In the UK! For REAL!   
No anarchy, though. Everything looks pretty normal…and then-- then I see it.   
Un-fucking-believable!   
A WHSmith book store!  
Just like we used to have in Toronto when I was a kid! There was one at the Yonge-Eglinton Centre, where my Baba took me to get my very first Roald Dahl book. And then they all disappeared, overnight it seemed.  
But they hadn’t disappeared! Not forever! WHSmith is alive and well and kicking it right here in Glasgow as if the 80s never died! Unbelievable! A charade! A mirage!  
Consider my mind blown.  
I stood there goggling my eyes out at this unexpected vision when someone bumped me from behind with a luggage cart.   
“Excuse me,” said the unmistakable voice of Robert Carlyle.   
I turn around expecting to see that actor guy, but all I see is this huge black dude looking at me, tapping his foot impatiently beside the baggage cart as if he’s waiting for me to do something.   
Maybe Robert Carlyle was standing behind him? No. Weird.   
“Could yeh scooch yehself ovah a wee bit?” says the guy, or at least I think that’s what he says, it takes a second for me to understand. It is clear he is trying to be patient and polite, but I am preventing him from doing something by standing there gawping at him wondering if he by chance swallowed a small actor by mistake.   
Why is he trying to get past me and walk into the wall anyway?  
“Yur blocking the door,” is what he says, but it takes me a few seconds to decipher. Then I look behind me and realize I’m standing right in front of the entrance to the men’s room. Wow, awesome Cammy. Waita hit that one outta the park.   
“Ooops, sorry,” I say and dart away, watching the big guy push the baggage cart through the wide doorway. I take a peek at his back as he goes in, just to make sure he doesn’t have Robert Carlyle velcroed to his back. No. He really does sound uncannily like him though. How odd.  
By now, I’m feeling really hungry and exhausted as you can tell from my obviously whacked out mental state, but I can’t fall asleep on the airport chairs because then I’m worried I’ll miss my connecting flight. Gotta have some coffee and maybe something to eat. I get to a food cart that’s selling food hoping for some normal sandwiches. No such luck. What the hell is a “ploughman’s lunch?” Sounds like something you throw-up after a bad night at Sneaky Dee’s. Either that or a Peter Greenaway film. No thanks.   
Then I see a glowing McDonald’s sign far off down the airport. I pull at my wheely pack and curse my decision to bring along a heavy hardcover book as my airplane read. It’s difficult to pull, but I know I can make it. I arrive five minutes later.   
Even though it’s really early in the morning by Greenwich Mean Time, (why is there no nice time?) there’s still a sizeable line. Lots of people talking. And most of them nearly impossible for me to understand.   
A bored woman in a McDonald’s visor waits for my order and suddenly I’m starving. I reel off my items with practiced ease, not thrown by the weird signs which aren’t quite what I’m used to and the symbol for GBP money looking like a fancy letter “L” and the fact that the packages of potato chips look exactly like the Lays ketchup chips I like at home, only instead of “Lays” the brand reads “Walkers” on the package, but in the exact same font, design and colours as “Lays.” They’re in weird flavours too like “prawn” and “oyster” further cementing the whole surreal alternate universe feel. This is not helped at all by the fact that if I were back in Toronto right now it would be one or two in the morning. Are they six hours ahead or five?   
I finish my order.  
The McDonald’s woman gives me a look like I just arrived from outer space and says “Wot?”   
The word just hangs there between us, flaunting that long, drawn out letter “O,” sound instead of an “A,” a big flat extended bass note of apathy and disgust. I start to get a little antsy, knowing all these folks are stuck behind me waiting in line.   
And I can just see her thinking in her head, “Seriously? Waltzing into my McDonald’s and asking for a double-double and fries? Puh-leaze! You think you’re in some American movie or something?” but not in my own accent of course. And I remember that even in the States where fries are fries and not chips, and chips are chips and not crisps, no one knows what a double-double is. It’s a weird Canadian thing, stemming from Tim Horton’s coffee, which they only have in American border cities like Buffalo and the American side of Niagara Falls. I try to tell her again, speaking slowly and explaining carefully and this seems to do the trick, but when I finally get to the benches, triumphantly clutching my bag of food in hand at last, I see that this isn’t what I ordered at all, but I’m too hungry to care at this point.   
I sit down behind a family talking animatedly behind me; a mom and a dad and two bickering little boys. They look East Indian. They sound like Robert Carlyle. Even the tiny little kids, high pitched, but still… Robert Carlyle. Uncanny.  
It’s like some f-ed up Scottish version of “Being John Malkovich” here.   
And then as the food and coffee suddenly infiltrates my hypoglycemic brain cells, sudden realization dawns, hitting me like a ton of bricks.   
My God, am I fucking stupid! Somewhere in an apartment in London I can just about see Ionee laughing her ass off at me as I tell her my brilliant new discovery.  
Boy, I hate feeling ignorant. And I do feel ignorant, so fucking ignorant.   
Before you decide I’m completely stupid for having never figured this out before, you have to understand that people on TV and in movies in North America—we all sound pretty much like we do on TV. I’m serious! In North America you don’t make up a special TV accent just to deliver the news or play a character on TV or narrate a documentary about Mars or anything! Why would you do a crazy thing like that? What actors sound like on TV in North America, that’s pretty much what they sound like in real life. Check the interviews on our talk shows, you’ll see, it’s true.   
Plus there really aren’t that many accents, especially in English Canada. Canadians who aren’t not from Quebec all sound pretty much the same except Newfoundlanders who sound kind of Irish. The way people sound on the CBC is pretty much the way they sound when you walk around on the street. It never occurred to me in a million years that the way those people on the BBC sound isn’t the way all people sound like in the UK.   
And yet… I’m beginning to think a lot of those people on those BBC shows I’m so fond of are doing some kind of—what is it—a fake TV accent? But that would be ridiculous. Is it possible? That there’s an actual “TV accent?” But how else can you explain it? Later, Ionee will explain to me about the whole “Received Pronounciation” thing, but I still think it’s fucking weird.   
I’ve come to this conclusion because I’ve suddenly realized that it’s not that all these people in the Glasgow airport all mysteriously sound like Robert Carlyle because there was LSD in my coffee or something. No, no, everyone in Glasgow kind of sounds like Robert Carlyle, because Robert Carlyle must be from Glasgow.   
Wow, how long did that take? Yes, give the girl a fucking prize!  
This may seem completely obvious to you, but I never realized it. I just thought it was this way of speaking unique to that particular actor, never realizing there was a whole bunch of people somewhere on the planet who sounded the same. Same with Anthony Hopkins and me not realizing that he wasn’t just speaking in a weird Anthony Hopkins-ish way to make himself more creepy or something, no, he’s just Welsh. That’s a Welsh accent. This I learned when we went to Cardiff for the Dr. Who Experience Tour with Ionee and Ocean.   
The Dr. Who Experience Tour was narrated by a young man, of probable Nigerian extraction whose nametag read “Terry,” but who sounded more like Anthony Hopkins’s creepy younger adopted brother, even though the only remotely creepy thing he ever said was that you could buy toilet paper with pictures of Daleks and Cybermen on it in the gift shop. I had a brief vision of drying off my vag with a Cyberman’s face and had a momentary explosion of laugh that seemed to frighten the crowd even more than Nigerian Anthony Hopkins.   
Where the hell did all these awesome accents come from anyway? It’s really cool, like music, everyone sounding distinct and different, like instruments in some big crazy, wonderfully chaotic band. Something in me, that long dormant language learning aspect I guess, is just itching to repeat the way they pronounce their words see if I can capture it right. But they’d just think I was making fun. Or “taking the mick” as Ionee or Ocean would say, another new phrase I’d soon to learn.   
It seems like every teensy tiny place here has its own particular way of talking, like even a particular accent for just a few tiny blocks in London, easily distinguishable from people living just a kilometer away and all that also bound up, I later discover, in how rich your parents are and whether you’re working class or upper class and where your people immigrated from if they did that, too. It’s completely confusing, but hey, at least it’s not boring.   
I flip open my DS and settle down to play some Kingdom Hearts. The coffee is humming through my veins now or maybe it’s just this place, but I feel like I’m moving towards something. I’m going someplace different, and I’m not bored, just listening to the people talking, mimicking them in my mind, looking at the differences in the stores or thinking about how they call carts “trolleys” and how someone thanks someone else by saying “ta.”   
The sports jerseys, (or do they call them something different here), on display at the WHSmith beside the magazines are all for teams I’ve never heard of. None of them are baseball ones. Suddenly, I miss the friendly blue jay on the Toronto Blue Jays’ hats you find floating over heads all across T’rawno, the powder blue T-shirts with the white stripes on the sleeves. Are all these teams soccer teams? How can there be so many? Lots of stuff says “Rangers” on it and I am pretty sure this is not in reference to the hockey team from New York.   
I look around at the ads on the walls, advertising cell phone companies who aren’t just various divisions of the Rogers Wireless megacrop, like they all are back home, so many companies with names I’ve never heard of, newspapers with unrecognizable celebrities splashed across the front pages, people who could walk down Yonge Street all day long back in T.O. and never once be noticed. And is it just me or do the Mars bars here even taste better? What do they put in their chocolate?  
I have no idea, but I want to feel it all, taste it, touch it, see it all! It’s a strange and wonderful new world.  
And there’s not a blue sign in sight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "The Passenger" by Iggy Pop and the STooges
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4hPnZUMBwA


	10. Ionee: No Uniform is Gonna Keep You Warm

IONEE ISRALS  
(London, UK)

 

9\. NO UNIFORM IS GONNA KEEP YOU WARM

Ocean scratches her legs in their tights and shivers. “I’m freezing Mum, when’re they going to get heating on the buses?”  
“Good question, it’s fucking outtah order letting us turn into ice cubes in winter like this. Driver’s got heat up in his cab I reckon. It’s not like they don’t got it other places.”  
"When I'm done school and it's Bonfire Night I'm going to throw this stupid uniform in the fire,” she whinges.  
“Good, I’ll help you. Hate washing the sodding thing. Can’t wait to see it burn the up.”  
“Yeah!” Ocean grins conspiratorially up at me. We both love Bonfire Night and hate uniforms so this was a safe topic for us.  
Ocean has an insane number of uniforms, not because I like the fucking things, but because the laundry necessitates me going up and down too many flights of stairs, which I hate. It has always been thus. Even before my ankle played up again, I was still a fundamentally lazy person, and remain one to this day.  
Ocean knows I can go off on uniforms for ages. If I had the money to send her anywhere else there's no way I'd be caught dead sending her to a school where she had to wear one. I hate hate hate uniforms.  Always done too, even as a child.  Kids’ve little enough choice about their lives as is without taking away their ability to choose their own clothing, too.  I guess it wouldn't be so bad if the uniforms weren't so uniformly ugly, those few hideous colours day in and day out and all that polyester that traps in the sweat and makes them stink on a hot day.  
I get the principle behind it-- they want the kids to feel solidarity to their school and they don't want kids to suffer if their parents are poor and can't afford the same clothes other kids can. That’s it in theory, but in reality, uniforms work out rather differently.  
First off, fuck enforced solidarity.  If being part of a certain group isn't something you freely choose for yourself then it's an imposition on you, innit? Just because you go to a certain school or grow up in a certain area don't mean you necessarily feel in synch with other people from there.  You deserve to choose your own definition for yourself, the group you want to hold allegiance to, or no group at all if you swing that way.  
The other thing about making everyone equal and uniforms making it so poor kids aren't teased about their clothes? That’s rubbish straight up. You think kids can't tell right off which other kids are poor or neglected?  Don't make me laugh.   
I could pick a few out on this bus right now, the ones whose parents let them come on their own even though they’re really little. Then there’s the kid who has only the two uniforms they give payment for from the council, the kid that wears the same two smelly uniforms over and over and over and hardly ever gets them washed. Really young kids can’t take care of their clothes themselves, so when the parents are neglectful or have too much on their plate, that uniform never sees soap or water for weeks and everyone else in class knows it.  
Of course you can peg the poor sod who’s wearing the same blazer day after day because who the hell has two blazers with the same blood stain from last month’s nosebleed right over the school crest?  
Then there’s that kid swinging on the holding strap right now, the one with the too-small uniform no adult’s bothered to have replaced, his little gut sticking right out. I mean come on! I would rather they just let the kids wear whatever cheap, mismatched clothes the parents can afford, as long as they’re clean, easy to replace, fit right and are comfortable enough to allow them to run and play freely. Let the poor tykes throw on some brightly coloured trainers too, instead of those ugly black old people shoes they’ve got them all wearing every day.  
I mean they’ll be forced into suits or work uniforms or inmates’ jumpsuits at some point anyway as they turn into adults, what the hell do they need to start early for? It all happens soon enough, turning you into another brick in the wall. Would it kill them to let the kids be free for a little bit beforehand?  
I secretly suspect it’s like those little girls whose parents start them off wearing a hijab in nursery. A few of the girls in Ocean’s class wear them, maroon ones of course to match their horrid school blazers, because even the hijab is not exempt from the tyranny of the school colours. Look don’t get me wrong I got nothing against full grown women and men choosing to wear a head scarf, kirpan, turban, kippa, niqab, saffron robe, rasta hat, pentagram or anything else for religious reasons, but saddling a little kid with that stuff, when they’re too young to make a real choice for themselves- I just think it isn’t fair. Because you know it’ll only end in one of two ways—either they grow acclimatized to it early and get so it’s the only way they’ll feel comfortable, or they come to despise it for being forced on them against their wishes and rebel as soon as they’re out of the house.  
Trust me I know about this stuff. I was programmed from the time I was born. You know, don’t eat pork and shellfish, don’t marry a gentile, don’t be gay or become a rabbi if you’re a girl, always support Israel, go to synagogue on Shabbos, blah blah blah. Or the best one… everything has a reason, it’s not up to us know, it’s all Hashem’s plan.  
Is that supposed to be comforting? Because it’s kind of a fucked up plan you ask me. I’m with Percy Byshe Shelley on this one—if there is a god he or she’s a bit of a sadist, that’s all I’m saying. Look, if I had some kind of cosmic plan for the universe, it wouldn’t involve so much pain and random underserved suffering and way more rainbows, unlimited supplies of music and dogs that pooed rose scented pot pourri, instead of foul smelling crap, but that’s just me. So now, I tend to think there’s not one, a god I mean, not a dog. No laws, no divine punishments, just the ones we give each other. The thing is, just because you as a thinking, reasoning adult know something’s not true doesn’t really matter, when the programming’s already in place. So to this day, I don’t eat pork or shrimp or other food that’s obviously treif, because just the thought of it makes me literally sick to my stomach.  
Am I all bitter or sad because I’m missing out on bacon or proper British sausage? Hell no. Of all the things I could change about my life that would never even crack the top 1000 list. What does kind of annoy me though, is that I never actually got to make that choice for myself. It would be good to not eat treif or if I was a guy, to wear a kippa because that’s something I chose, for myself, out of respect for my religious tradition, not because I’ve been conditioned into wanting to retch at the mere thought of eating pork. There is a difference between making a choice for yourself, and having the disgust and guilt implanted in you, without your consent, deep down in the foundations of your soul before you’re old enough to know the reasons for it or make your own real choice.  
The first time I skipped Yom Kippur I felt horrible. This despite the fact that Yom Kippur is my least favourite of all the Jewish holidays, as it involves spending the whole day fasting until you’re light headed in hot September, sitting through boring prayer repetitions and sermons and mentally beating yourself up for your sins until you get a nice guilt-on, all in the effort to make sure God puts you and your family in the book of life for another year rather than the book of death. An entire holiday dedicated to worrying and feeling guilty. What fun!  
I was five years old the first time Mum explained to me about this whole Book of Life and Book of Death deal, and that God was looking at me right there and then on that very day and weighing my hyperactive little five year old soul in the balance to determine whether I was deserving of another year on this planet and just how that year would pan out for me. The whole idea scared the crap out of me then, anxious little five year old kid that I was and I still find it pretty disturbing now, even when I know, logically speaking there is absolutely no proof that any of this magical book stuff actually goes down. But just the concept of it. Yikes.  
The first time I skipped Yom Kippur, it was to see the reunited Buzzcocks play a gig in Birmingham. The whole time I was there, pogoing in the audience, living it up, I felt Mum and Dad’s eyes upon me staring me down all the way from Canada, as I ate chips, (“probably fried in lard” said the Dad brain inside me), drank Strongbow at the hostel with some friendly Austrian tourists, (“whose grandparents were probably Nazis,” supplied Mum-brain), and played a late night gig at the Flapper with my band, (“something wrong with those people, look what bad influences did to your father,” commented Bubie-brain). From the stage I could imagine Mum and Dad shaking their heads in disappointment along with the people nodding to the music in the crowd.  
Fucking guilt, man. Watch out for that shit, ‘cause it will fuck you up like heroin. You think I’m kidding? I remember lying in the hospital, brain like a crashed computer, RAM erased on restart, while tripping balls on morphine, stuck full of pins like a voodoo doll, learning Sy was dead and that life had basicallyfucked me in the ass without lube.  
When shit like that happens and your frazzled brain automatically starts looking for reasons, the last thing you want to be thinking, as you’re lying there in more pain than you’ve ever felt, with nothing to occupy your mind other than shitty daytime TV,, is “If only I hadn’ta gone to that Buzzcocks gig in Birmingham on Yom Kippur in 2007, none of this would’ve ever happened.” Trust me, that shit’ll just drive you nuts. Thinking that this is some kind of punishment for that. Sure, when you’re rational and not fucked over by grief and the nightmarish disaster that is now your life, it don’t make sense, but in that state-- in that state where you can’t run away or distract yourself and all those guilts and doubts come to prey on you in the dark and feast on your blood and bones and brain-- thinking shit like that is the ultimate mindfuck.  
As if it would’ve made a bloody bit of difference, what I did on that particular day years before the car crash anyway? It was bullshit, I knew it, but when those thoughts get their hooks in you and you’ve got hours to kill just staring at the walls, in your long dark teatime of the soul, you can’t help going over it and over it in your mind. Fuck, I can’t even think about that time without wanting to change the subject, without wanting to get moving, outside somewhere, away from that feeling of being pinned down and trapped. So let’s change the subject already, time to think about the task at hand, yeah?  
I drop Ocean off at school. She doesn’t seem all that bothered to see me go. “Say hi to Aunt Cammy for me!” she says and I haven’t the heart to ask for my usual hug or kiss on the cheek before she leaves. She zips on past me, straight in through the tall green gate that goes all the way around the school perimeter. Don’t want to embarrass her in front of her mates, right? Still, I miss it. It’s the only kiss or hug I ever get nowadays.  
Stuff it, no sense moping about it today. Ttoday is special. Today I’m going to meet up with Cammy for the first time in two and a half years in person! I can’t believe it’s been that long and I’m so chuffed she’s coming.  
I got the place reasonably clean and a set of clear plastic drawers purchased just for her. I even made space in my room for her things. I hope she stays at mine.. It’ll be so nice to have real adult company around, to be with family again. Nothing is going to happen this morning to bring me down. Because now that Cammy’s here things are going to change.  
Only now I’m getting sort of nervous. I get like that, from super chuffed, to super nervous and back again on a regular basis. What’s going to happen when Cammy sees me, I wonder—sees all of me, I mean.  
Heh, maybe she won’t notice. I look down at the stick in my hand, the polished eight ball glinting dark and evil in the sun. Like fuck, she won’t notice.  
Aw, whatever. This whole thing’s been stupid anyway, keeping the whole mess a secret. Maybe it’s time to let it all out, get it over with and move on. Let Mum and Dad chew me out if they want to. Why keep pulling the wool over their eyes? A true punk wouldn’t dissemble like this. Johnny Rotten, he’d say fuck it, this is me, don’t like it, you can get bent. Only I can’t say that to my parents, not when they helped me get well in the first place. How can I tell them all that work and money, they might’ve just as well thrown it in the dustbin? I can’t do that. There’s got to be another way.  
No, no, I won’t go down that road today. Cammy’s coming and everything’s going to be alright from here on in and we’re sticking with that attitude.  
I scroll through the play list on my MP3 player as the bus rocks up in front of me. The doors pop open and there it is, as if on cue, Electric Light Orchestra singing “Don’t Bring Me Down” rising up from the player, through the wire into my earbuds, the beats matching my stride perfectly as I ascend the steps. I couldn’t have cut it better if it was a music video and I thank the driver for this perfect bit wof synchronicity. I smile at a young dad with a baby who moves a diaper bag off the seat beside him for me to sit. I take my seat on the fuzzy blue rainbow flecked TFL standard upholstery and watch the tyke in the pram blowing spit bubbles and giggling.  
I remember Cammy when she was that age, the first baby I remember really taking care of. Now she’s taller than me. As I turn the music up, I know I’m doing what Cammy told me is called, a “gear shifting activity,” changing my focus and going into a different headspace from the worries, from the memories of the time after the crash. Occasionally she does have some good tips. Not that I listen or anything.  
The last time me and Ocean were in Canada was before all this recent shit hit the fan. I haven’t been completely honest with Mum, Dad, Shoshanna or Cammy about the full extent of what happened. I don’t think I could’ve dealt with it, them getting all freaked out and worried on top of everything else. I could just see Mum or Dad ditching work and hopping the pond, coming to help look after me and Ocean, making me do this or that. There were days, especially after Jams left for good, that I wanted it. Wanted it desperately. Days I ran the bathwater just to cover up the sound of me crying so Ocean wouldn’t hear. Especially the day the cast and dressings came off, and I saw the ugly mess of it. It was just like the first time all those years ago, except without Mum there to kiss me all better, and Dad to make me feel normal and rub my back until I relaxed.  
I just couldn’t do that to them again. One time was more than enough. And I knew I could get through it. Just keep going, drag myself to the shop every day, work, pay the bills, pick up Ocean from school, get some takeout for us to eat, take the painkiller tablets and fall asleep in front of the telly with the kitchen timer set to wake me up in time to make sure Ocean changes into her PJs and goes to bed. I haven’t taken any backing gigs since this happened, but they don’t know that, that I’ve been off session work for nearly a year.  
I look right enough sitting in front of the computer on Skype where they don’t have to see me walking around. To tell the truth, I was hoping I’d be able to ditch the walking stick before anyone came out here to visit, but no joy there. I’m supposed to do these stupid PT exercises every day for half an hour at home, but I’m so knackered after work, I just conk out as soon as I sit down. I know I’m not getting any better. How much longer I can go on before I have to face the music and have another operation to try to correct this useless mess I’ve been walking on I don’t know. I haven’t been to the doctor in a long time. They told me some…unpleasant information last time I was there. Whatever, can’t dwell on it. Just take things one day at a time, and push on through. That’s all I got for now, just try me best.  
But, sometimes when Ocean’s not around to distract me I get so frightened. There is a Joe Strummer quote that goes “The Future is Unwritten.” Usually I think it’s a good thing, like what happened in the past doesn’t have to be the same thing that happens in the future. But sometimes it scares me, thinking about it, how precarious our future is. Nothing is secure.  
Ocean’s been so good about it all, me being like this, I mean, but I know it effects her and I can tell she’s missing Jams, too. Even though I’m officially not talking to him anymore, I did let her have a Skype date with him and that seemed to perk her up, at least short term. She made me close the door, when she talked to him.  
I was lying on the couch half asleep in front of Top Gear thinking about how Jeremy Clarkson’s head resembled a large potato, when I distinctly heard her mention my name through the wall. Ocean was talking about me to Jams and I could only just imagine what she was saying. I wanted to drag myself up off the couch to listen in at the door, but I was just too tired and my ankle felt like a bunch of fairies were attacking it with miniature jackhammers.  
So I just turned up the telly and Richard Hammond bounded across the stage, talking excitedly about a new Mazerati. I have fond feelings for him. We share a kinship of sorts, having both gone through an automobile accident while accelerating at high speeds and survived to tell the tale more or less intact. He has two friends, just like I used to, who accompany him on all his adventures, one of whom is this quieter pseudo- hippie bloke, (that would be Jams or James May) and the other this tall mouthy guy, who’s pretty funny, but also is sometimes a bit of an arsehole, (City and Sy taking turns for Jeremy Clarkson in my mind). Unlike me he seems to have this almost unlimited energy that I envy.  
Back when I was in secondary I thought I might make a good television presenter. I like attention. I like having loads of friends around to entertain with my humorous and mildly shocking observations. I would’ve kicked ass in Edwardian society at tea time, chilling with people with names like Algernon and Cecil like an Oscar Wilde comedy.  
It’s not the same when I’m alone or with people who don’t really understand me. Jams understood me. Talking with someone like that, it’s as good as sex, better sometimes. Feeling your brain zipping so fast back and forth together through the conversation, it’s so stimulating—it’s like you’re soaring. It’s hard to find people who get you, y’know? So this past year I’ve had to be creative. I have a few imaginary friends I keep about to talk to in my head, whenever I’m lonely or need someone there to cheer me on. Hammond is one, regardless of his interest in that position. Should his energies flag, I also have imaginary Oscar Wilde. Him I imagine hovering about supplying amusing comments on the foibles of humanity that I witness at work, keeping me from hitting the roof in frustration through well-worded epigrams of elaborate elegance and intellectual precision. There’s Johnny Lydon too, from the Sex Pistols, mouthing off about stuff in his characteristicsly amusing way. I have others too, some of whom I only break out when I’m really super bored or soul crushingly lonely. Sometimes when it gets hard to be myself I pretend I’m someone else. I once spent an entire day at the shop doing Danny Kaye’s character from the film “the Court Jester” and none of the customers even noticed. I’m not sure if I should be disturbed or gratified by that.  
Unfortunately, pain has a way of distracting you from the illusion. But I know I’m not really down so low these days, ‘cause I can still make stuff like that up and it makes me feel better. The mind’s still in good nick, and not too drugged up, like it was years ago in California. If I can keep going like this I’ll be alright I tell meself. So what if I like pretending that the people on Top Gear are my friends, lying on the couch with my aching foot on the ottoman, half asleep, dreaming about driving around France in weird cars, making jingoistic comments and having adventures? It’s harmless. Maybe a tad pathetic, but what of it? I’m sure you do stranger things in your spare time and trust me it’s better than the pharmaceutical alternative. When you’re on pharmaceutical “top gear,” like morphine or oxy, your imagination can go flat, into pure grey noise after a while, like turning on the telly and just getting dead channels and snow. It’s hard to imagine anything and it’s fucking frustrating. These days I’m still getting loads of imagination stations, so I know everything’s not gone completely pear shaped just yet.  
Be thankful for small mercies, yeah?  
Things like the sun, warming up the cityscape now, heating up the bus inside, so it’s nice and cozy.  
I swing my feet under my seat and check my reflection in the bus window. You’re looking good just like a snake in the grass pump the E.L.O. vocals in my ears.  
Maybe so, maybe so, but a little extra lipstick never hurt anybody either. I pop a tube of Mac out of my pocket and apply until even. The bowler hat comes out of the carrier bag and I give it a bit of a twirl before placing it on my head. There. Now I’m truly ready.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> XXXXX  
> Chapter title from the song "No Uniform is Gonna Keep You Warm" by Nightmare of You  
> https://nightmareofyou.com/track/no-uniform-is-gonna-keep-you-warm-demo-2004


	11. Cammy:  Break on Through

CAMMY HALES  
(London, UK)

10\. BREAK ON THROUGH

Finally, the last leg of the journey. The short trip from Glasgow to London. In T’rawno we call this a puddle jumper. Not sure what they call it here.   
I get to customs and now I’m scared as I stand in the interminable line. But this is normal, I remind myself. It’s just like all those times you drove across the border with Mom and Dad between Canada and the States.   
“Don’t let them see you’re worried about the DVD player under the car seat or the suitcases in the trunk,” I could just hear Dad saying. So many memories of cross-border smuggling to fall back on for amusement…  
And then my turn at bat.   
“Are you bringing any drugs or alcohol with you?”   
“No.”  
“And what are you going to be doing here in London?”  
I show her the youth mobility scheme papers, visa, work permit from TeacherCo. She looks through them as I think back to Dad’s voice in my head telling me the proper way to conceal Corning glassware from the Outlet Mall in my backpack and then bam she’s stamped my passport and I’m on my way.  
And now I’m light as a feather as I walk through the gates. My massive hockey bag of clothes is right there, pirouetting around the baggage carousel, waiting for me. I’ve broke through, out of T’rawno at last. I’m here in England and I’m gonna be famous. I’m free.   
One more set of doors to go, and she’ll be there, Ionee. Yeah, we’re going to be fucking bad-ass together! Sisters doing it for themselves, yeah, I could hear Annie Lennox singing on the imaginary soundtrack of the movie of my life. Yeah, we’re going to tear up London like it’s going outta style. Ready to get smashed, hammered, party forever! I am so prepared, bouncing down the escalator out the arrivals gate in Heathrow, grooving to the theme music in my head.   
And then suddenly I stop. If this was a movie, I’d hear that record-scratch sound and the music would instantly cut out.   
Cause it’s not Heathrow at all now, is it?   
I’m in Gatwick, that’s what it says on the ticket, I suddenly realize.   
Fuuuuuuuuck.  
But I told Ionee…   
Oh sheeeeeeet. Shit! Shit! Shit!  
But hey, it has to be close to Heathrow, right? RIGHT?   
Lugging my giant hockey bag and wheely backpack, sweating under my triple-insulated fake Canada Goose coat, I finally locate a map on the wall of the airport.  
Gatwick is all the way where? And Heathrow is…all the way across this city of 7 million people about as far away as one point can get from another and still be in London at all!   
Well fuck me!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> XXXX  
> Chapter Title from the Doors "Break on Through to the Other Side"  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r679Hhs9Zs


	12. Ionee: Train in Vain

IONEE ISRALS  
(London, UK)

11\. TRAIN IN VAIN

“And then Cammy told me she didn’t want to stay in a place where people ‘can die from just being outside!” exclaimed Mum. “She has to be so melodramatic! It’s always been a major thing with her though, the weather. I don’t think she’ll ever get over what happen at the U.S. embassy with that citizenship thing. She’d her heart set on New York or going back to LA. One day she’d say Boston, the next Savannah, Georgia. She needs to settle down. I don’t know if she’s really that focused on the teaching at all, either. She’s late for half the supply jobs she gets. Partly, it’s that she can’t get a gig really teaching, it’s all just special needs assisting and she gets lost all the time on the way to supply gigs. Then there’s the last job she had where some kid closed a door on her hand and then last month another kid nearly choked her out! She had bruises on her neck and everything! I worry about her, you know, Ionee? She wants to make it big on the music scene, but nothing’s happening here for her with that. I just wish she could find some work here to make her happy. I just want her to be happy, for all of you to be happy. You know that. Please, please look after her Ionee. She’s not used to being so far away and London’s such a big place.”  
“Jeez Mum, stop worrying. She’ll be all right. Look, I survived here, right?”  
Pause.  
Across the world I think I can read Mum’s worried mind like we’ve got telepathy. Please Ionee, don’t let her fuck up like you did.  
And then I remembered something Cammy said weeks ago:  
You think your life’s so fucked up? At least you’ve got your own shop, your own employment, a wage you can survive on, a kid who loves you, friends, a place of your own. What’ve I got? I’m just a fucking parasite off Mom and Dad and as long as I stay here, that’s all I’ll ever be. Trust, me you can do a lot worse than you have. That’s not what the ultimate fuck up looks like in my mind.  
I knew what the ultimate fuck-up looked like in her mind, even if she couldn’t say his name. Her friend who killed himself. Jonah. There was a whole line of men’s clothing stores with exactly the same name too, in Canada and they advertised everywhere. Almost every other spot on the radio was “Jonah’s Discount Menswear Miracle.” Used to drive him crazy, people coming up to him, saying “So are you going to give me a discount menswear miracle?” all the time, Cammy use ta say. It’s hard to get it out straight from her, what happened with her old friends, so I asked my Mum and she told me. I’d always thought Jonah’d straighten himself out one of these days. It’s a fucking shame, what happened to him. He was a good guy at the heart, no matter the drugs and some of the other shit that happened later on. And Mitch, just up and leaving. Can’t say I’m surprised. Never could take responsibility for anything, him, but they’d been together seven years, since they were newly minted teenagers and she’d only ever been with him and no one else before. No other boyfriend in her life. Even Sy and I’d only ever been together for six years and I’d been around the block a little before him. No wonder Cam’s so bent out of the shape. Poor Cammy.  
One more thing you should know about Cammy, is that she has this weird way with words and names. She has trouble saying certain things, not physically you understand, but she has… taboos, that’s what it’s called. There are things she can’t write or read, too. A lot of people don’t understand about that, but it’s not that weird when you think about it. It’s like how my leg is mostly fine if I walk on it a certain way and I can go on pretty normally for a while, but when my ankle goes in one direction it just triggers all this pain or it goes completely numb. And who knows exactly why? I think it’s like that for her, like her mind doesn’t hurt too much in general anymore, now that she’s on the medicine, but if she thinks about certain things, it just goes all weird and hurt and scared. From what she’s told me she’s gone for this thing called behavior modification which is kind of like physio for your brain or something, where they make you walk in those mental places you don’t like to go and do it and do it until you can finally do it smoothly, without pain or hesitation. Only it didn’t really work on her and the only thing that made a difference were the pills, which sort of damp things down a bit so it’s tolerable. I can understand. About pills and shit. She’s good at hiding in conversations, Cammy is, moving words around so that the taboo things don’t get said. There are plenty of words in the English language so it’s not that hard to do. She has a degree in it after all. English Lit y’know, along with that music stuff. You could live with her for a year and never notice. You’d have to know her really super well to be able to tell. But I know her really well, I mean we met when she was a fetus, so there’s that.  
And now I’m taking the train out to Heathrow to meet her. My little sis. I can’t wait. Riding the dark blue line that goes around the loop. Terminals one to three, here we go.  
I’m sure we have almost identical genes where it counts. It’s funny because we don’t look alike or sound alike and our tastes in food are completely opposite, but inside, we’re more alike than any two people not born twins have a right to be.  
I think Mum and Dad were sad to see Cammy leave, but in the end, they had to help her come to London, because even though they knew they’d miss her, they always wanted what was best for us, what would make us happy. Poor sods. If there’s anything I wish that I could do in this world, it’s to make good on their hopes and dreams for alla us, me especially. I know they wanted more for me, much more. They try not to let on that it’s all a bit disappointing, what I’m doing with my life, but I know. I know.  
I know Mum worries I got some of my bio-dad’s attitude in me. She shouldn’t worry. I may have something, but it ain’t that. I do have his colouring though, tanned skin, slightly darker than the others, curlier hair, with more blonde to it, though who knows what the real colour is these days. I’ve dyed it so many times I have no idea. Cammy keeps her hair a normal colour, so as not to freak out head teachers at the schools she works at. She’s taller and thinner than me—Ionee 2.0 if you will. I’m glad I’m not as tall as her though. I fit much better into overhead storage compartments and Japanese capsule hotels. I also wear much stranger clothing, due to my long presence in the market.  
How many times do you have to walk by a rudely worded T-shirt in the market, before you think this item might actually make a laudable addition to your collection of similar shirts, featuring depictions of Darth Vader trimming hedges shaped like space ships or spray painted male cops snogging each other? There must be an actual number, statistically speaking, to explain how I came to own ninety quid’s worth of cardigan with blinky lights that react to sound from Cyberdog and two (two!) pairs of venetian blind rapper’s shades in electric blue and shocking neon green, but I digress.  
There was another phone call from Mum the day before Cammy arrived. “Please Ionee, take care of her,” she pleaded with me again. “Make sure she works hard and gets to her teaching jobs on time, you know? She has a bit of trouble with time management.”  
A bit of trouble with time management? Really? That had to be the understatement of the year. Saying Cammy had trouble with time management was like saying Goldman Sachs had a bit of an image problem with the Occupy set. “Watch out for her okay. Please don’t let her mess this up.” The unspoken words there being “like you did.”  
I couldn’t blame her for thinking that and she didn’t even know about my recent fight with Jams and re-injured foot. How could I be mad? What she said came from love and a sense that all my problems were her fault for picking my original dad to marry in the first place. Of course, had she not, I wouldn’t genetically be here, but there you go. Now, with Cammy, she had to get everything perfect, make up for every old mistake. But she couldn’t see it wasn’t like that. You just make new ones. Couldn’t she see?—All that mattered was she loved us and supported us—that she was there. Just there. The only thing I was ever really angry at her for was for just expecting me to follow her and Dad to Canada when they left again, leaving me alone here in London. Sure, I was grown-up by then, in college and that, but even college kids need a family. After they left I had to find a new London family and for a while, at least, the Fuck-Ups provided.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> XXXX  
> Chapter Title from "Train in Vain" by the Clash  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3Yl4ehzX-o


	13. Cammy:  All this and Coffee Too

CAMMY HALES  
(London, UK)

12\. ALL THIS AND COFFEE TOO

I’m sitting at the café table sipping my coffee. I am so dead tired that even this extra tall cup of solid black isn’t helping my sluggish brain get in gear. I always forget the mild is the one with the higher caffeine content. I think in the future they’ll invent some way to mainline this shit into our veins because I don’t how I’d run without it.   
I’m waiting for Ionee. Poor Ionee, who is going to be seriously pissed. I offered to come to her, but she’s not having it. Said I’d get lost. I mean I couldn’t even give her the right airport name, so what makes her think I could make my way through the tangled spaghetti that’s the subway system here with all its baffling multicoloured lines on my own and not screw that up?   
Now Ionee was coming all the way from Heathrow to Gatwick by tube and National Rail just to pick me up. Cab’s not even an option because she informed me tartly that it’s 120 pound from one airport to another, which I figured out quite quickly is something to the tune of 240 Canadian dollars! I currently have a grand sum of 400 CAD in my bank account after paying back my line of credit to the bank. I also have two credit cards, both of which I have to clear before they’ll let me use them overseas as I carelessly forgot to set that up before I left. I suck at planning!   
And now Ionee was coming to get me like I was a little kid lost in the mall or something. It was fucking embarrassing.   
“Look I’m not some spoiled little brat,” I argued with her on the phone. “I’m an adult and I’ll pay the cab fair over. I have money.”   
“Don’t be ridiculous—you are not spending Mum and Dad’s money on a black cab. Now just cool your jets and I’ll be there in an hour or so.”   
“Are you sure?  
“Yes I’m sure,” she replied testily.   
“What about the store?”  
“It’s a Tuesday morning. Who goes to a bleeding punk shop on a Tuesday morning?”  
“But it’s such a long way and your leg—“   
“Is fine so just shut up.”  
Oh shit, she’s getting mad. Which, let me clarify, I’m not worried about on behalf of myself. Ionee’s pretty much a marshmallow, especially where I’m concerned, she’s never even yelled at me ever and certainly would never hurt me or throw me out in the street to sleep, being new in the country and all that. Even something like this—my latest organizational catastrophe, she would typically have endured with a few expletives and stoic resignation. The fact that she was irritated enough to sound genuinely pissed at me, I knew meant she was in pain and probably not fine despite what she told everyone at home.   
Why shouldn’t I be surprised? She didn’t like people fussing about her—it just pissed her off which is kind of the opposite of me. I like being taken care of, she likes taking care of other people. Maybe it’s a youngest vs. oldest thing, but it was one of the main differences between us.   
I tried again, “Look I’ll go to your house, I’ll wait for you there.”  
“Do you even know the address?”   
“Of course, I have it right here in my pocket. I had to give it to the immigration lady to be let into the country.” I stick my hand in my insulated pocket, still sweating like a pig in this stupid winter coat. Guess what? The address I wrote down-- I must’ve left it there at the immigration counter because my pockets were empty of everything except Kleenexes and old receipts. “I-I must’ve lost it,” I stammered.   
“All right, sit tight,” she said, resigned. “I’m comin’ to getcha.” And then she hung up the phone before I realized I should’ve said the store—I should’ve met her at F.U.- I could find my way to Camdentown Station somehow and once there—I’d been a time or two before- I was sure I could find the place she worked. I tried phoning back again, but my cell was dead, batteries all used up.   
I looked to charge it in an outlet in the wall and then remembered the electrical outlets here are all wrong, you need a converter, of course, typical. I saw the pay phones, cheery and red by the Costa coffee, but then, with a sinking heart, I realized that with my phone dead, I had no idea what Ionee’s phone number actually was. It was a long string of number, British style and impossible to memorize. Perfect. Just perfect.   
So now I’d have to cool my heels until she showed up. I was dead on my feet and ready for a power nap, but I didn’t want to fall asleep and risk someone stealing my bags. I ordered another cup of coffee, remembering not to ask for a double-double like I had in Scotland.   
My God, what time is it in T’rawno now? There’s a point you get to where you’re so tired, you might as well be drunk. Even your speech starts slurring and you can’t walk straight. I’m nearly swaying on my feet in this line right now and things are going a bit blurry.   
I had to ask the lady at the counter to repeat herself, but she was cool about it, not like in Quebec where everybody gets their back up. Soon as they hear you talking French with an “English” accent in Quebec, it’s all over, (and yeah, you’re English or “Anglo” to them even if to the real English, you’re considered American and to Americans you’re considered—ah forget it, it’s just too fucking complicated!). They pretend not to understand you thanks to your crappy grade school French, and sniff that you can’t speak it better, ignoring the fact that you’ve never had to use it outside the classroom, because if you’re from T’rawno you know the real second language of the city is Mandarin Chinese, federally mandated bilingualism be damned.   
Well, hopefully after this stunt Ionee will still want me at her house. She better, or I’m seriously screwed, ‘cause home’s no place to get my career started. Oh, it’s not that the bands aren’t good in T’rawno. I’ve lived in Los Angeles, home of the music industry, grew up there as a kid and I’ll tell you the bar bands there aren’t so great. Whatever you find in a shitty little T.O. pub is leagues above what you get in a comparative dive in LA. But that’s because you can be an awesome band in T’rawno for years and years and still be playing these shit-ass small gigs forever. There’s just no big labels around to sign you on the T-dotted line and record execs are sure as shit too lazy to bother coming up there from New York or LA. There are bigger venues of course than the little pubs, but to play the Molson Ampitheatre or Sky Dome (excuse me, “Rogers Centre,” now that the cable conglomerate’s bought out that place too), you have to be someone with an international fandom like U2 or the Stones, someone big enough, at any rate, to lure people across the border to the show.  
I’m not really sure what the music scene in London is like. It might be like home with all these really good mid-level bands playing the same tiny pub venues, year after year, only managing to break the big scene after surviving for ages in the trenches. Making it big when they’re almost too old to be a draw for the younger crowd and only have a few years of serious mass appeal left. Or it could be like LA, where any band that’s even halfway decent in town is instantly scooped up by a company, (it’s just convenient, you know?) even if they’re not quite ready yet, then dropped like a hot potato as soon as they prove themselves unable to handle the demands of record sales and punishing tours after just one studio album.   
The thing that appeals about the London scene is that it’s so concentrated, everyone in this one little place. Also, you go on tour in the UK and the flights won’t be a third as long or expensive as they get up to in North America even if you do mainland Europe into the bargain. Being in a band might be considerably cheaper than back home, I’m thinking, at least in gas mileage, train tickets and airfares.   
My first order of business once I get established is to buy myself a half decent keyboard so I can start playing and composing again. My heart is set on getting a Vox Continental someday. It’s this transistor based combo organ used by Ray Manzarek of the Doors and lots of other famous 60s and 70s groups. It has this really insane sound that I love. It’s like hearing sex and psychedelics and paisley shirts through your ears. Seriously, how can you not listen to “Riders of the Storm” and not think of people making mad love under cloth canopies depicting giant Buddhist mandalas, a lava lamp on either side of the bed and tabs of acid on their tongues? Shame no one uses the Vox Continental in pop songs anymore. The Stranglers in the 70s and 80s were close with David Greenfield’s keyboards, but I think he was on a MOOG. Whatever, I’m going to change all that someday. Ionee says there’s a piano warehouse down Walm Lane just a block or two from her place. It’s fate, I know, me living there. That’s the store I gotta hit up the day after I get some sleep. I’ve got it all planned out, me and my sister, we’re going to start a band. The two of us together and perhaps some of her old band mates, we’re going to take this fucking town! We’re going to be a band and we’re going to be famous and all that shit that went down in T.O. is going to fade into the background forever by the light of our fucking glorious success.   
Assuming of course, Ionee’s not too upset about this current airport debacle and that remains to be seen.  
“Oi, Camera Club!” says a familiar voice from behind me. “Look alive!” says Ionee and grabs me up in a hug.  
“Irons!” I scream and jump up like it’s Caribana time and suddenly, I’m holding her in my arms like a long lost love.   
Now we’re up close, not on Skype, but in real life! God! I take her by the hand, and we stand at arms’ length, just looking at each other. She looks a little older and chubbier than I remember, even though I’ve seen her on Skype just recently. There are small creases at the corners of her eyes and she seems a seems a touch bedraggled, with stripes of brown and a teensy tiny bit of grey in her purple hair that didn’t show in the pixelated picture. She’s wearing a black bowler hat and holding a cane with an eightball from a billiard set on the top. Classic Ionee! I instantly feel like I’ve gone to Fan Expo underdressed, but I just say “It’s great to see you! Sorry about getting the airport wrong. Was it hard to get here?”  
“Whatev, I need the exercise.” She pats her stomach. “Could’ve done without the zone changes though.”  
I nod like I fully understand what that means and then I remember. Right—the fees were based on how far you went on the subway.   
Then I noticed her eyeing my coffee with increasing interest.   
“Hey, how about a coffee?” I suggest. “Least I can do for making you drag yourself all over the city.”   
“A’right,” she says with a tilt of her head and a smile that lights her face up straight to her eyes and above, right up to her slightly uneven eyebrows. Ionee had a way of smiling at you that made you feel awesome.   
That was always the best thing about going to see the Fuck-Ups in concert, I remembered just then. You’d see them rock up onto the stage and the first thing that met your eye would be Ionee’s dazzling smile. She’d just be grinning ear to ear like she was so glad to be there, like there was no other place she’d rather be than with you, the audience, turning all that intense light in her soul into this fuel strong and crazy enough to stoke a supernova. No sneering or berating or cussing out the crowd for the Fuck-Ups. They weren’t those kind of punks. When you listened to them they took you on a journey to someplace else, all of you together. Sy reached out his hand to the crowd and the crowd reached back as if they were all taking ahold of his hand at the same time and zoom, there you went zipping off together to some other world of craziness and music. Sometimes I forgot, listening to Ionee complain about everyday things like rent checks, washing machines and annoying neighbours, that she had the ability to do that inside her, that she wasn’t quite an ordinary person. Perhaps that was why those other, ordinary things seemed so difficult for her, I don’t know.   
But being with her in person, I’m beginning to recall, a bit of that presence she had on the stage. I grin back from ear to ear and suddenly I’m feeling tongue tied. Now that this big journey across the ocean is over and I’m past immigration and finally here, across the pond with my big sister who I’m going to be spending all this time with, I just can’t think of anything to say! The silence stretches awkwardly and all my doubts and fears about what I’m doing here crowd into the space it leaves in my head.   
“Hey,” she says touching my shoulder through my giant padded coat, interrupting my thoughts. “It’s great to have you here. Me and Ocean, we’ll get you sorted. So don’t worry about anything, okay?”  
“Okay,” I nod and suddenly my head feels good and clear again as I walk over to the Costa coffee. I realize that’s exactly what I needed to hear.   
Ionee downs her coffee surprisingly quickly once I bring it back, her hands in their striped fingerless gloves twisting at the corrugated cardboard holder around the cup. Suddenly I recall all those other times I’ve seen her do that motion, forgotten up until now, ripping labels off Snapple bottles, shredding the outside of ramen noodle containers. Jeez, all those weird little details you forget about a person when you don’t see them for a while. I sip my own coffee more slowly, my third of the day. I have to stay awake and alert, at least until I can hit the hay at Ionee’s. Right now my head is bobbing and it’s a challenge to stay upright.  
And then it’s like the coffee suddenly hits me and I’m talking to her a mile a minute about the seven hour flight and how the entertainment system wasn’t working and all about the airport in Glasgow, WHSmith, Robert Carlyle and weird prawn chips and then “hey, I got you something for Ocean,” I say and pop out a Scottie dog stuffed animal in a tartan coat that I got in the airport gift shop in Glasgow.  
“Aw, completely unnecessary—“ protests Ionee.   
“I have stuff for you too!” I reassure her. “Only it’s in my duffel, so I’ll have to dig through it all when we get back to your place to find it. But hey, don’t worry. Oh and Mum and Dad got you these from their trip to Hawaii—“  
“Cammy wait—we can do this all at the flat—“ she laughs, looking pleased and embarrassed.  
But I’m on it and passing a tiny black box I had in my backpack over the table to her.  
“Mum picked them out,” I say. She flips open the top to find tiny enameled earrings shaped like those special Hawaiian flowers, pink hibiscus I think.   
Ionee smiles. “Aw Cam, my favourite flower,” she says and we both know it is. She only has two tattoos, which is quite a low number for a punk rock person. One is of a tiny hibiscus on her shoulder that she got in California with Ocean’s name beneath it, back when she’d had a brief obsession with learning how to surf. And she took off her golden hoop earrings which she’d been wearing since the last time I’d seen her and put on the flower earrings right there without even needing a mirror. “We should call Mum to tell’er you’re here.  
“I texted from Glasgow,” I say.  
She takes out her cell with a grin. “Still, we should call. You know how she worries.”  
Now Ionee is pressing the buttons and talking into it. “Hey Mum! Thanks so much for the earrings! Yeah, yeah, Cammy is fine! Me? Yeah, I’m doing great! Chuffed to see her, yeah! You wouldn’t believe it though—she got the wrong airport! Uh-huh… No she--”  
I groan. “Io-NEE! Why’d you have to—“  
“No, no you can talk to her—“  
Now she’s pushing the phone in my direction, grinning that shit-eating grin, like she’s pleased to get me in trouble. Revenge for making her come all the way out here, I guess.   
By the time I’m done with Mum I’m more than ready to head out.   
Ionee makes a grab for my hockey bag. “Last of the light packers, eh? That thing’s going to be murder in the tube.”   
“Jesus Christ, Ionee—what the hell do you think you’re doing? You are not taking my giant duffle!”  
“A’right, a’right,“ she shrugs holding a hand up in surrender.  
“Just take the smaller one.” I give her the handle to the backpack on wheels.   
“These wheels are shit,” I complain as I drag the stupid giant hockey bagduffle alone, realizing yet again that my packing skills are crap. I just get anxious and throw everything in, worried I’ll need this or that and here we have the end result.  
Ionee says nothing, a few steps in front of me in the wide white airport hallway, content in her superiority as a master light packer.   
I watch her walking up ahead with the lighter bag and I can see now that the cane is not just for show now— it’s not just a bit of colour and flare from the market, like the bowler hat and striped gloves. No, she’s really leaning on that thing and I see it’s a struggle just to pull along that little wheely backpack. Shit, her limp is really bad. Is this a recent development? I didn’t notice before, she sort of snuck up behind me at the tables by the coffee place and then she was sitting while I got her coffee. All those times we talked on Skype it’s just her face I mostly saw. You’d think she would’ve mentioned it, if it happened just recently.   
I knew she broke her ankle a while back, slipping on the wet kitchen floor and that it wasn’t totally better for some reason yet, but not much more than that. It was the one she’d hurt before in the crash all those years ago. But shouldn’t that have healed up by now? It was over a year later! Jeez. I hadn’t seen her this fucked up since LA. Damnit. What was going on here? There was that fight she’d had with Jams around the same time, I remembered and now he’d lit out to Brighton or something, but I’m beginning to feel there’s more to this story, so much more going on than she’d said.   
And all this time with her on the Skype I’d been talking about my problems and how crummy I was feeling about Mitch and all the rest and about the lack of work in T.O. and the psychiatrist I’d been seeing. All this time, Ionee’d been playing her cards this close to the vest and I didn’t even realize it! We’re supposed to share everything! We’re sisters dammit!  
Then it dawns on me. I’m not the only one. Mum, Dad, Shoshi-- they have no idea. No fucking clue. None of them. Christ, Ionee, what the fuck have you been up to?  
“Ionee?”  
She turns and grins wolfishly at me, like she’s daring me to say something, but I’m not going to get into it with her right in the airport, not while I’m still grappling with the hockey bag. I will get to the bottom of this though. The truth is inevitable.   
“You coming or is this your day off?” I can hear the challenge in her tone, but I don’t rise to meet it. Not yet. Let’s just get to the train first.   
I move forward, pulling the giant bag and overtake her. Soon we’re on the Gatwick Express train from Gatwick to Victoria.   
The seats are plush, the aisles spacious. We take our seats facing each other over the dinky little table. Ionee puts her feet up on the chair next to me with a sigh. She closes her eyes and folds her hands across her stomach like she’s about to fall asleep.   
I should be the sleepy one here! Hmmm… maybe she was on something again.   
I stare down at her maroon Bludstone boots. She once explained to me that oddly enough, they don’t sell that brand much in the UK. They’re Australian, but the best place to buy them is in Canada, go figure. So these must be the ones she got three years ago, when we shopped for them on Queen Street back at home. They’re scuffed up beyond all measure, the toe part so scratched and worn to pale pink, that they look like the boots were supposed to be two-tone on purpose and not like she’s worn them for three years and never polished them once, which I’m guessing is the truer scenario. I look down at her crossed ankles, hidden by the folded up cuffs of a pair of loose black pants with red pinstripes. Looking closely I can see the bulky outline of an artificial shape stretching out the fabric of her right cuff. This isn’t a new addition either, I can see that, because the pants material is worn down in that area, with a little hole in it showing through, worn out from repeated chaffing and stretching against something underneath. Some kind of hardware, I’m guessing.   
Shit on a stick, how the hell could she keep this from me, of all people, after everything I told her? I need to find out what’s going on before the top of my head pops right off from the pressure of my anxious curiosity rising up through my body.   
I reach under the tray table. I give her ankle a gentle squeeze. Okay, what to anyone else would’ve been a gentle squeeze, but to her I now gather felt like I’d put her ankle in a vise.  
“GAHK!” a single pained syllable explodes out of her as I feel rigid plastic under my hand. My stomach flips in my belly.   
“Fuck!” she yells. “What the FUCK, Cammy!”   
Now everyone in the train car-- their heads are whipping around at the swearing, but I don’t care. I hold on, snake my hand up her pant leg and touch some sort of little plastic knob, like on a radio. I feel more hard plastic, rubbery cushiony stuff and Velcro.  
“Stoppit!” Ionee grabs my hand, fire and pain in her eyes, but I’ve already rolled up her pant leg and can see she’s sporting a rather complicated leg brace below the knee, lots of black plastic and space age crap, like she mugged Darth Vader or something.   
“Leave it out,” she gasps and finally squirms free, yanking her feet angrily off the chair.   
She glowers up at me as she crosses one leg over the other, balancing her injured ankle on the knee of her other leg. Her eyes are watering as her fingers rub her wounded part nervously, like she’s trying to dissipate the pain.   
“I-I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t know!” I stammer. It’s the truth. I honestly had no intention of hurting her, but she is well and truly mad now.  
“I drag my ass out here to get you and this is the thanks I get? Trying to have a go at me, while I’m just sitting here minding my own business? You fooking mental? You wanta go? Is that it? You keep this shit up and I’m ringing Mum!”   
“Yeah, yeah,” I duck my head. As if she would really tell Mum. I don’t think so. Not if it means whatever secret she’s keeping getting out. I don’t care about that, but if we’re going to live together under one roof I need to be in on whatever’s going on. She’s not keeping it from me anymore. “I’m sorry. Look, I’m just worried about you.”  
“Yeah right,” she says, fussing with the Velcro straps on her brace. “You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”  
“Ionee, What happened?”   
“To what?”  
“To your foot, you dumbass!”  
“You’re the dumbass!” she retorts and suddenly we’re both six years old, even though we were never that young together at the same time. I don’t say anything. She looks up at me now and her green-gold eyes, less blue than mine, get big and pathetic, like she’s going to cry. But she’s not getting the sympathy vote from me this time. I’m silent as a stone waiting for her to talk, though it’s hard, so hard. I just want to hug her, really, but I wait it out.  
She breaks the silence with a shaky sigh.   
“Okay, promise, not to tell Mum…or Dad… or Shoshi or—“  
“I get the idea. Just spit it out. What happened?”  
“Ankle replacement surgery,” she says quickly as she can.   
“What? Why?”  
“I broke my ankle last year like I told you, but all the hardware inside, holding things together that they put in after the crash— the doctors saw on the x-ray it was all cracked and the bone had gone all crumbly, too, over the years, arthritis-y, you know? They said it was too broke up to make it worth their while to try to stick the pieces back together. Best to just chuck the lot out and put an artificial replacement in. Seemed like a decent idea at the time.” She shrugged.  
If she was trying to be offhand about this, it wasn’t working. “Were you in the hospital a long time?”  
“Three days. It wasn’t so bad. Since then…I’ve just been recovering, you know?”  
“Seems to be taking a while.”  
“No fucking kidding.”  
“Why didn’t you tell us? Why keep this shit under wraps?”  
“Come on, Cammy,” she sighs. “You know how Mum is. I tell her I’m going into hospital and she’s on a one way ticket out here.”  
“So? What’s wrong with that? She coulda helped you.”  
Ionee looks out the window, though there was nothing to see but the blackness of the tunnel now rushing around the train. “Cammy, you don’t remember how it was the first time around.”  
“Oh, I remember,” I say bitterly. A flood of memories hit me as I say it, but I give them no quarter. “You know De Nile isn’t just a river in Egypt, Ionee.”  
“Ha, ha, I taught you that one.”  
“Naturally.”  
“Look, I just didn’t want to go through all that again, Mum having to take over my whole life like that. I know it was necessary at the time, back in California, but things are different now. I can be on my own okay these days and I’m not in such bad shape. Not really compare to then. Back then, she set up everything, all those doctors in LA and all those months of physio and top notch therapy and all the rest. You have no idea how much it cost them. All because of my own stupid fucking mistake! It was my fault, but they had to pay for it. You think I had insurance? I know I’ll never have enough money to pay them back. The bills—seriously you have no idea. I had no idea until just a few years ago. It was insane. I nearly went insane when I found out. Probably shaved a few years off their lives with that one. They coulda bought a retirement condo in Florida on that money. I was supposed to be this big rock star by now. Buy Mum a Mazerati, all that shite, you know. I want to take care of them, not have them take care of me, y’see? Always causing them trouble and that.”  
“Ionee,” I shook my head. Why did she always have to be so ridiculous? “You don’t have to pay them back, they’re our parents—“  
“Fred’s not my biological dad.”  
“Like that matters, he thinks of you as his kid, same as me. You know that. Don’t you think you would’ve done the same for Ocean, if it was her?”  
“Yeah, of course. But I just don’t want to be a parasite on them again, and then have them up here, interfering with my shit. I mean they’re older, going to retire soon. They don’t need more tsuris, you know? They need to save their money, get themselves a flat in Florida or something.”  
“Why’re you so worried about the expense anyway? You just need more physio right? How much could that cost?”  
“Mmm… maybe not just more physio.”   
“They want to operate again?” I press her.  
“Maybe. I haven’t been back in a while, y’know? Last time I was there the doctor said she said wanted to take the replacement out and fuse the lot together so there was no more joint, said that’d take care of it for good, only she said I’d still have a limp and not be able to run after. Didn’t sound like fun, so I quit seeing her.” She shrugged.  
“Didn’t sound like fun so you just quit seeing her? Ionee, what the fuck? You do have a choice in the matter. See someone else, you’re not sure about one doctor’s advice. That ought to be allowed, socialized medicine, or not. I thought this place was fucking civilized, you know? Anyway, you should be talking to Mum about this. She’s the doctor. See what she says about you having the surgery.”   
“C’mon Cammy, can you see Mum being satisfied with that? She’d make me go to all these specialists. Private clinics. Drag me around to get different opinions, you know how it is. I’m just sick of all that shit. I just want to live a normal life, not be reminded of all that crap again.”  
“But if it’s interfering in your life—“  
“What happened will always interfere with my life. That’s just how it is, it’ll never be 100% fixable, no matter what you do. I get that, I’m over it, but she—she thinks there has to be a way. She gets these ideas in her head, like she always wants to fix me, to make me walk straighter, slim down, dress prettier, get a better job, a husband, a degree—“  
“You know it’s not that! She wants to help you. She just loves you and wants everything for you-- for all of us! She knows how great you are and just wants you to realize your full potential! Truthfully Ionee, are you happy with the way things are?”  
“Ecstatic, why do you ask?” she says and returns to rubbing her ankle.   
“What are you doing that for anyway?”   
“Fooking thing’s asleep,” she mutters sheepishly. “Wouldn’t happen to have a fork on you, would you?”  
“A what?” I shake my head. I can tell she’s trying to get me to smile, but I don’t feel like it. “I don’t know what you did to yourself, Ionee, but it looks rough. You need to go back to the doctor and whatever they tell you to do, which I know you aren’t doing now, physio, surgery, whatever, it’s about time you fucking did it, okay? For your sake and for Ocean’s. Or are you just too fucking scared to--”  
“Yeah, thanks Cams, next time I need unsolicited advice, I’ll bloody well ask, okay?”  
“Seriously, I’m telling you ‘cause I’m concerned. If I can’t be straight with you, who can? Maybe Mom’s kind of thing is what you need.”  
“No, I don’t bloody well need that and neither does Ocean. Ocean needs me here, with her, not back in the hospital up to my eyeballs in morphine or on the couch doing fuck all with my leg in a cast. Assuming I come out from under that is. Things can get royally fucked in surgery, I know, I saw what happened to Sy’s mum. Anyway, who’s going to run my shop while I’m out of commission? How am I going to make money? Think about it, Cammy. Jams isn’t around-- I mean who’s going to look after Ocean? Get her ready for school and feed her and everything? You think I want Social Services coming here to take her away?”  
“Ionee, you know me and Mum and Dad would never let that happen.”   
“I know, I know. I just—“ She had her bowler hat on her lap now and was playing with the brim, flipping it around one second, running her fingers through her hair the next. I could see she’d gelled the curls down, but now they were puffing up again. I wondered about the last time she’d washed her hair. “Look, they’ve already helped—Mum and Dad,” she confessed. “They send me a little every month. They sent me some more this year for Ocean’s after-school art and theatre program. It killed me to ask, but you know, it’s for Ocean, and I was running short.”  
“And was that so bad?”  
“Yeah, it was fucking bad,” grumbled Ionee.  
“Really? Why’s that?”   
“They made Ocean go to Hebrew school!”  
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Seriously? That’s what you’re bent out of shape about?”  
“Yeah!”  
“And is she still going?”  
“No!”  
“Why not? They try to force feed her matzah or something?”  
“Har har, think you know everything don’t you? That wasn’t it,” Ionee looks me wearily in the eye. “One of the kids goes to Ocean one day, she says to Ocean, my little girl-- ‘Oh my mum says your mum’s a smack’ead,’ I mean what the fuck? A fucking smack’ead she called me!”   
“A what?”  
“A smack…head,” said Ionee pronouncing each word with exceedingly irritated precision. “She called me a smack’ead, like a drug addict, you know? Right to Ocean’s face. I mean what the hell? Hebrew school kid, nine years old!”  
“Seriously? Fucking A.”  
“I know, right!” Ionee bristles visibly. She begins massaging her ankle again with a little more vigor than seems completely necessary. “Apparently, some daft mum thinks, ‘hey why don’t I tell my kid her friend’s mum’s a crack whore?’ ‘Cause that makes logical sense! Fucking racist. Just ‘cause Ocean’s mixed, innit? And the school office they’re all—‘well, that doesn’t sound likely, are you sure you aren’t just misinterpreting it?’ all smug and smirky like. I mean, where the fuck do they get off? And this slag doesn’t know me from Adam either. Like I needed that? On top of everything else? Fucking kid. Saying shit like that to Ocean! Like we’re not good enough, just ‘cause we live above a chip shop? We’re law abiding citizens, a sight more law-abiding than those fucking bankers and they fucking criminal bonuses, I’ll tell you that. Just because we’re not rich doesn’t mean—“  
“Come on, Ionee, I’ve only been in England one day and already on about the one percent again. You know our parents live in Forest Hill right back home, right?”   
“Look, just because you’ve been living in a country where everyone likes to pretend they’re part of the dwindling middle class, despite hard evidence to the contrary, and ignore the obvious problems right in their faces, doesn’t mean I have to.”  
“Speaking of people putting things in their faces, are you taking anything these days?”  
“Am I ‘taking’ what? Orders for desert? Phone numbers? Bin liners out to the curb? Want to be a touch more specific?”   
I asked this because I want to know what I’m getting into here. I don’t remember precisely what happen with that sort of stuff back in the LA days, but I remember there were issues. Opiates, oxy, stuff like that.  
“Aw fuck off,” she says wearily, without malice. “Since when were you Mum and Dad? Sides, you know I wouldn’t touch that shit again, didn’t even want it the first time, stupid doctors just forcing their crap on me. ‘Oh no, it’s not addictive’ they said. Bullshit. Look, put your mind at ease, it’s just cocadamol, nothing else. Oh and Sertraline as well, though I’m beginning to think that shit’s fucking useless. Listen,” her voice goes down an octave, conspiratorial. “I know you’ve been on that stuff for a while…”   
That and a mix of other SSRIs and antipsychotics recently, but I don’t tell her that.  
“Um, can you still— when you’re on that stuff—do you find you can still--“ She makes some sort of unfathomable miming motions with her hands.   
“Walk in the wind? Press against an invisible box? What are you trying to show me?”  
“Uh…”  
“You are a very bad mime,” I tell her. “Spit it out.”  
“Can you still—“ and now her voice goes very small— and her eyes look all darty--“you know get it off?”  
“Get it—what? You mean—“  
“Orgasm, yeah. So? Can you? Yes? No?” Her eyes go large, like there’s a whole lot riding on my answer. Shit, I hate to disappoint her.  
“No.”   
She looks down, a little crushed. I know she has the same problem now and I start feeling defensive. I mean big fucking deal, I still enjoy it. More than most people too. I’m still good at it right? Sex isn’t just some orgasm contest or anything. It’s more than that. Just because you can’t O doesn’t mean you can’t fuck someone’s brains out and enjoy the hell outta it too. Why do people always make such a big fucking deal about that one little part of the act anyway? I’m just as good at it as anyone else. Better. I’m better.   
“Shit’s over-rated anyway, I’ve probably had way more fun in more ways than anyone on this train,” I tell her trying to come off all nonchalant and experienced. “Anyways, I get close, I think. I’ve been on meds since before I was interested in stuff like that,” I tell her, though she should know that better than anyone. I hate saying it, makes me feel fucking pathetic. “Maybe I have? How can you tell?”   
“You don’t know? It’s like— hard to describe-- I guess it’s different for everyone. There’s this awesome pressure you feel, you know? Deep down there, like right above your vag and all your nerves are awake and pulsing and strumming along and your feet get hot on the bottoms and then it’s all like whoosh, the release and you feel so great and relaxed-- like that really good feeling you get right after you’ve taken a shit—“   
“Gah! You’re gross, you know that? Who the hell explains an orgasm like that?”  
“I don’t know! You asked me! Don’t complain if you don’t like the answer I give!” She paused, then looked around slyly. “So, uh, do you get the thing with your feet getting hot on the bottoms?”  
“Yeah, sometimes,” I admitted.   
“That’s really fucking weird, innit?”   
“Sort of. Why are we talking about this again?”  
“Sorry. It’s just kind of hard to explain to someone who hasn’t--  
“Don’t sorry me, okay? It’s fine.”   
“No offense, chill.” She raises her hands in apology.  
“Ionee, why do we always, always, always end up talking about sex! I mean I haven’t seen you in ages and now it’s all orgasms this and vaginas that! Tell me more about Ocean, what happen at the Hebrew School after the whole smackhead incident?”  
She flips her striped scarf over her shoulder and has instantly shifted conversational gears. “Buncha tossers! You think I’d let my Ocean keep on going to a place like that, where she felt she unwanted? Fucking bullies. I was well pissed, let me tell you. So I marched meself in there and said to the head teacher, I want my money back. And since Ocean only did a few lessons there, they gave me half.”  
“And what did you guys do with your half of the cash?” I ask. Actually, I know what they did. I just wonder if she’ll tell me the truth without prompting. It’d be a sign at any rate.  
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” she says and raises an eyebrow at me, like she spent it all on some crazy scheme, trying to recreate the dominoes scene from “V for Vendetta” or something equally mad.   
“You blew most of it on a shopping spree at Hamleys,” I tell her the straight.  
“Ah! How did you know? You weren’t supposed to know!” she moans.   
“Ocean told me over the phone last week.”  
“Ocean!” She hits her forehead with her palm. “Puh-lease don’t tell me you told Mum!”   
“C’mon, who do you think you’re talking to here?”  
“Thanks,” she says before putting her boots back up on the chair. She leans back on the cushiony head rest, closing her eyes. Her hair with its pink and purple curls puffs up like a cloud behind her head or the petals of some peculiar punk flower. A flower that looks a little wilty today. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her this way.   
It’s okay Ionee-flower, I’ll water you.   
Above the sympathy and frustration, my heart, it thrums with love.   
Who else have I ever been able to talk to like this?   
This feint and bluster of conversational sparring, without ever worrying about offending? Knowing you’re that safe, that you can trust nothing you say will ever make her reject you. Free to be vulgar and profane, to drop that stereotypical mask of politeness, which I realized had been stuck to me somehow in T’rawno, like a clammy second skin I’d assumed, one I hadn’t even been aware I was wearing. Not all the time though. Whenever we talked I let her speak to the real me, Cammy Hales, the genuine article. Now that _____ and Mitch were gone, I think her and maybe Mom and Dad sometimes were the only ones that got to speak to the real me.  
And now I just want to hug her and take all that hurt away, all that struggling and fighting and just make it easier. And then I realize, I can, I can make it easier. For myself and for her.   
I cross over to her side and sit down beside her. I put my feet up on the seat, too, even though there’re signs posted everywhere telling you not to. Fuck posted signs.   
My boots also look like crap, white ridges and rings of salt over the black from another shit-tastic Canadian winter, the leather all cracked and damaged.   
Unlike Ionee’s mine were just new in October, but these winters, they just wear them out quick. They’ve started to leak, but with all the preparations I had to do for my trip, the task of spraying my boots again just slipped my mind.   
I put my arm around her and she half-snuggles into me.   
It’s strange, because in my mind I still remember when I was the smaller one, snuggled into her side as we watched Saturday morning cartoons. Somewhere in my mind I recall being four years old, sitting on the lawn at the CNE Bandshell watching Barney the Purple Dinosaur in concert with teenaged Ionee, future punk rocker, looking as fierce as possible at a children’s concert, in a “the Damned” T-shirt, trying to show the world she didn’t give a shit if anyone else thought it was uncool, she was there for me. She loved me that much. She would even tolerate Barney for me. Now see that, that is true love.  
“Do they sell waterproof spray here?” I ask.  
She cracks open an eye. “Waterproof spray?”  
“I think you’ve just answered my question.” This is another one of those inexplicable lacks in the UK, along with the deficiencies in air-conditioning and central heating, that I’ve noticed on previous visits here.  
“You know if either of us ever wants to go into business with a product that’d be a sure fire hit in this country it’s waterproof spray. That’s got to be the best idea I ever heard of. I mean, better than putting vinyl all over everything to keep the damp out, innit?”  
“Yeah, you’d think so. Certainly rains enough for it to come in handy.” I put my arm around her shoulders. “I’m really sorry about before. I didn’t really mean to hurt you. You’ve got to believe me. Is your ankle okay?”  
“Yeah, just don’t do it again,” she grumbles.  
“Are you and Jams really not talking anymore?”  
She plays with the fringe on her scarf and I can tell she’s thinking of Jams and his scarf obsession. He never left home without one, wrapped tight around his neck, hiding the scars.  
“Yeah.”  
“What the hell happened? I thought you guys were tight.”  
“You sure you really want to know?”  
“Hit me,” I say.  
She punches me in the arm.   
“Ionee!”  
“Oh right, Canadian slang.”   
I roll my eyes, because clearly it isn’t.  
“A’right, just remember, you asked to find out.”  
“Come on now, is it really that sordid a tale?”  
“Could be, seeing as how I’m the one telling it.”   
“Enough stalling, just lay it on me.”  
She flops herself over and puts her head in my lap. “What? You said ‘lay on me!’”  
“You are a fucking dork you know that?” I tell her.  
She grins up at me, still full of mischief. “Oh I know, I know.”   
I can see Ionee is still trying to deflect, to jesterify, to stall just that little bit longer even now. But we both know I’m going to find out about Jams anyway. And before the train makes Victoria station, I do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> XXXX  
> Song "All this and Coffee Too" by ? I can't remember, but I will find the reference somewhere.


	14. VOLUME TWO: THE CLASH    City: It Gives me a Sense of Enormous Wellbeing

BOOK 2:

THE CLASH  
August 2012

 

 

FELICITY “CITY” MARTINGALE  
(Sheffield, UK)

1\. “IT GIVES ME A SENSE OF ENORMOUS WELLBEING”

First off don’t call me “Manchester City” or “Man City” or “Man United” or any of that other shit. I’m not from Manchester, innit? I’m from Sheffield and this whole “Manchester City” thing, that’s just Ionee’s invention that she used to introduce me with when we toured. It’s complete crap, honestly. Typical Ionee.She’s a stupid nickname for everyone. The was supposed to film our first video, right? Vickie Anne? She called her V8. Seriously. Waita get the director on your good side, Irons. Look, she calls her own kid Ocean Spray for chrissakes—Ocean fooking Spray. You know what Ocean Spray is? A fooking cranberry drink they go for in America. But she’s like that with everyone—has some stupid little nickname for ‘em—I mean Jams was James or Jamie before Ionee came along and Sy was Ray or Rav or Ravana. I was always called “City” though, even as a kid. Ionee didn’t invent that. My full name, “Felicity” means good fortune, but I guess that didn’t make no sense, not when it came to me, ha ha. 

I’ll tell you what it is, the whole nickname game with her—it’s a way of putting her stamp on you. I used to almost like it you know, this feeling of belonging to somebody, someone ready to stand up and say hey, I count this cunt here as my friend and I’m not ashamed.  
And back in the day, Ionee was someone you wanted to belong to—just something about her you know. And at first you think it’s all fun, but it’s not in the end. Ionee gives you a name and she gets to expecting things from you, gets all disappointed when you show your true colours like she don’t realize what you was before, but anyway once she’s named you, you’re hers forever and she never forgets it.  
That was my first mistake. I reckoned on her being like other people, that she’d just let Sy (excuse me, Sitikantha Ravana Gupta, before Ionee got at him), go and good riddance once she’d found out I be knocking boots with him. That they’d have a big row and she’d be angry some it and hate on him, and that be that.

And she was—she was angry. And she did—she did hate him. But here’s the kicker—she still loved him, too. The hate didn’t erase all the love that came before it. Ionee just couldn’t ever let him go, y’know? 

It’s like the whole punk shop thing. I mean what the fook? A punk shop. In the year 20- fooking-what now? I went there later, after meeting her again in London, first time in ages. We’d not seen each other since the crash, had to see for meself, the shop she was on about, suss out it were as lame she made it seem. I went back to London a year later, but I ain’t seen her. Some year later, phony American chick at the till. Fooking sorriest thing you ever saw. Ionee in a nutshell, that place. Pictures of Joe Strummer on every viable surface like he’s Saint Mary or something. I mean what the fook? Listen I saw Strummer back when he were alive and playing with the Mescalleros one night this pub down the market and he ws just this fooking guy, yeah? No one special. Seemed like a right wanker, someone’s middle-aged dad in a sweater vest or something.  
But Ionee… you can’t tell’er fook all. Always taking it so bloody serious, the whole punk thing. I mean, tell the truth I wasn’t even into that kinda music before I joined the band, more into Northern Soul and reggae, me. I met Ionee and Sy and all I was thinking well here’s a band and they’re mates with Jams so they’re probably a’right, let’s see where we can go with this. Okay, tell a lie, I want to shag Sy till his eyes popped out his head, but so did everybody back then, so I ain’t unusual. The end game, was always, always, make loads of money, and get the fook outta Sheffield, but Ionee don’t have that kind of perspective. No, see t’her it’s about issues and politics and all that shite no one gives a fook about. Normal music ain’t about people on the dole or the misdeeds of corporate America or rubbish like that. It’s “I love you, baby let’s do the nasty,” and “sex, drugs and rock and roll.” And you know what? That’s alright. No one wants to listen to this political shite. It don’t make money. She should know miss-thinks-she-so-clever. Posh university prick with her fooking doctor parents. Man of the people, her. Fooking hypocrite you ask me. 

But hey, she’ll call me a drunk, a sell-out, traitor, boyfriend-stealer, shite disturber, but it don’t matter, cause you know what? Even after all that, I’m still her girl. No matter how fooked up I am, I’m still her responsibility. She made me what I am now, innit? Sure as me Dad made me drink and me bruvva made me a fan of the football, she made me into her drummer and unmade me once she sussed out what I was up to with Sy. It’s her fault I ain’t never drumming again. 

But I’m betting deep down inside she still fooking loves me, the idjit and that’s what I’m counting on. That, that there is what gives me the power, power over her. That she needs me or at least thinks she needs me, which is really the same thing So I’m the one with all the cards. And I’m the one who’ll call the shots today.

Time to pay up bitch. Today’s your day.  
Today I walk into your fooking flat over Willesden Green tube and destroy you. Tonight I destroy your fooking existence just like you destroyed mine.  
It don’t take a knife and it don’t take a bomb, none of that bloody towelhead shite to hijack this train. Just a few true words to the person wot needs to hear them, and BOOOM!  
Just like that. 

I’m going explode her world.  
And it’s going to feel great.


	15. Cammy: Never Tear Us Apart

CAMMY HALES  
(Toronto, Canada)

2\. NEVER TEAR US APART

It’s so quiet here now, with no Mitch and no ________. Mum and Dad and Shoshi work all the time. There is our housekeeper Larissa, and she is my friend. We talk and joke together, but she is busy, too. I spend a lot of time in the living room, sitting on the floor, like I don’t even deserve the couch.  
Once life was like a big hallway of doorways going on forever, doors to a million future possibilities, all open to me and I had all the time in the world to choose. Then one by one, in quick succession the doors all shut. Now I was trapped in the hallway with no way out, and no idea how things got so bad so fast and why it kept on getting hard to breathe as the hallway got narrower every day.  
The first thing me and Mitch did upon finding out ______ died was fuck. 

I’m not kidding about this. It was the same feeling I got two years before when we got home from his grandfather’s funeral, this weird desire to make love in the face of death.   
It’s a hard thing to explain, but after the initial shock, this weird feeling came over me, completely incongruous and inappropriate, but I felt it all the same. We—me and Mitch-- we were still alive! He felt it too, I could tell. It wasn’t the most romantic sex I ever had, but I’ll give it this—it was intense. It had power. 

Power to push back the dark.  
At least for a little while.

Afterwards came the crash, the dullness of depression that damps down every urge to engage with anything, including love, but for that moment and that day I was on fire with urgency. The urge to prove we were still here, still had the power to do the very thing that makes life and negates death—the act of biological procreation, staving off the inevitable nature of mortality.

I just needed to experience that pure shot of pleasure, extra insulation against the despair I could feel coming on, to keep myself from drowning when it   
came and get to that place high up in my mind where it’s like you’re standing on a mountain, like I did as a kid at the top of the Alps in Switzerland. You just take the cable car of sex up there and suddenly you’re in this perfect field of pure green grass and everything else is far away beneath the clouds, shrouded in the puffy white mist below and you—you’re separate and apart, far above the clamouring problems of the world and all around you are fields of purest green, dotted with buttercups and the air is peaceful and pure. You look down and see that the clouds are hiding everything—everything but your mountaintop of green grass. Only the cable car and the small wooden chalet are there with you. That’s all there is in the world, just you in your pure self. And everything is quiet and clear. Your thoughts aren’t jumbled. You can just look across the sea of perfect white-gray clouds hiding all the city from sight and listen as you are suddenly lifted clear from the chaos and distraction, to a place where concepts crystalize, are well defined and suddenly obvious. That peaceful place in my mind that I so desperately needed now. That clear pleasure that would blot everything else out including the gray tidal wave of sorrow I felt rising behind my eyes—ready to crash down and obliterate me with its power and the panic surging up to meet it. Not now though. Let it heave me up and catch me and turn me over until I don't know which way is up and drag me down and try to drown me, but I will have my pleasure now, while I still can.

If only the sex feeling could last—a slow release like XR psych meds, but the glow doesn't last. For a few hours it stopped the pain from coming but then… 

The next month was horrible and the sad, but at least Mitch was still there. Even if we fought and broke up and made up and broke up again with each other multiple times afterwards, at least I knew he was always there. At the other end of a phone or computer or down the street, ten minutes drive by car if I wanted. At least we could hold onto each other, weather out the storm together, whether we were officially a couple or not.   
And then suddenly Mitch was gone to California. Like he hadn’t told me I meant everything to him once, like I was just some old jacket to be sloughed off when I went out of fashion. It seemed so unlikely, but one day he just up and left, went with a director friend to shoot a film in the States and never came back. It felt like a betrayal. Hadn’t that always been my dream? To leave this place behind for the big time in America, land of my childhood? And now he’d disappeared where I couldn't follow, stopped taking my calls, responding to my e-mails. He was supposed to take me. I was the one who talking about going there to make it big. It was never his dream, not until I introduced him to it. 

That was the worst thing Mitch ever did to me. It wasn’t the money or the physical stuff between us, no, it was tossing me away, like he hadn’t been the first true soul connection both of us had ever felt in our lives. Like it hadn’t meant shit to him. Like what I felt we had together was just in my head alone and I knew that wasn’t true. I wasn’t imagining things. It’s just he forgot, forgot about what was really important. Leaving me alone just when I needed him the most— when I needed Mitch my best friend, who was always more important than Mitch my lover-- taking that shoulder to cry on away, just when I was at my weakest. Leaving me bored and friendless stuck in T'rawno with only my traitorous mind for company. Like none of it had meant anything or really mattered in the end to him at all

Leaving me to be looked after by my parents, who somehow still cared about me even if I’d stop caring about myself for a while. My parents who still loved me and worried about me. 

When you connect with someone on such a deep level, there is nothing like it in the world. That type of relationship is hard to replace. Maybe it requires a certain amount of openness, naivety, newness and trust that can never be regained once broken. But there is just something that happened to me, when I talked to him and felt our thoughts synch up together, conversation like ping pong balls lightning fast going back and forth. What a relief to not have to pretend you’re someone you are not, to be wholy and completely understood and embraced for everything you are, or so I thought. But maybe it wasn’t like how I thought it was at all. It’s a real blow to the ego to discover I’m so easily replaced, not sexually, I could deal with that—all that friendship and the witty repartee and making movies and music together—how could he stop talking to me, now that I really needed him? How could he let me face this horror alone? 

We were supposed to take over Hollywood together. I had the album I was going to write about it all planned. “Two Kids from Canada Conquer Hollywood” or something like that. 

What a load of shit.

And I knew, no matter how much it hurt, I wouldn’t have done the same to him. Broke up with him? Maybe. But never, never would I have stopped talking to him, stopped caring how he was or left him in that black pit of despair, without my voice to guide him back out of it into the light, not when I had it in my power to help. 

So why, after all this time do I still yearn to talk to him? Do I care that much about the reasons why he did what he did? No, that’s not it. I accept it. Most people are selfish, after all. 

No, after all this time, what I really miss most are the conversations. It’s so quiet here, at home, alone.


	16. Ionee: Temptation

IONEE ISRALS  
(London, UK)

3\. TEMPTATION

I don’t do falling in love, all that cliche romance crap Hollywood says I'm supposed to fancy just because I’m female. Okay, I fall in love with authors and film stars and characters from shows on the telly, but that’s it I swear.

  
Before I switched to art college when I was 19, I was an English major and every now and again, I’ll decide to reengage with my studies and go on an author binge.  
There are some writers I took in school I always end up coming back to. I’m not a big fan of reading things more than once— too easily bored, me, and I usually sell my books to the second-hand place in the market once I’m done with them, but every now and again I have to reread Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales. They’re like a box of rich chocolate truffles, each one perfectly wrapped and more decadent than the last. There are layers to those stories, and best of all, some copy of them always seems to be kicking around the local charity shops for two quid.

  
This particular edition had an interesting pencil drawing of a penis on the title page and an introduction for “the Nightengale and the Rose,” all about Wilde’s doomed love affair with Bosie, his little blue-eyed golden-haired Adonis. I imagined him as young Jude Law from the Stephen Fry film. I thought of dangerous, moth-to-a-flame style love, forbidden, especially in those days, and bound to end badly. I think even Oscar Wilde was a bit in love with that image of himself as that, the tragic hero, the man of noble qualities brought low by his single fatal flaw.  
Though it must’ve sucked royally for his wife.

  
Still, how could I not get behind a man who ruined himself for love? A person of prodigious intellect who broke himself on the rocks of illicit lust and base desire? I mean, if you want to get sickeningly romantic about it, me and Sy literally broke ourselves on the rocks of our own messed up union, (with less fruitful poetic results and far more limb damage), though without a doubt in my mind, City did have something to do with it all, that day in the canyon, even if I can’t remember exactly what.

Look, I’m just saying I can sympathize. If you’re going to ruin yourself for something, better do it for love of another person, rather than queen or country or any of that patriotic bullshit.

But screw romance, I’m done with that shit.

And “Romantic Comedy?” What the fuck is that? Listen, romance will fuck you up big time, and double that if you’re a woman. Shit don’t work out, who do you think’s left with a bun in the oven, debt in the bank,mcareer on the rocks? Not the bloke, that’s all I’m saying. And seriously, fuck those bullshit films where the credits roll with some big wedding, like that’s the fucking peak of a woman’s life, the end goal of it all, fuck that, yeah?  
The creative work—that’s what’s important. What, you think that movie about Darwin is over the moment he hooks up with his cousin? Nah-ah. How you leave your mark, your fucking contribution to the ongoing discussion, that’s the thing. I’m all for sussing out the best and kindest way to be human and leaving the world a better, more brilliant place to live. I know it doesn’t sound very punk rock, but going fuck the police and fight the power alla time only gets you so far. Mum always taught me getting a guy isn’t the main thing in life. If it happens, great, but you know, whatever. Still, I don’t think Mum, though she was a teenager in the 60s, quite got over all that double standard crap about being a proper young lady she got fed as a kid. Not to mention all that 1960s sex and peace and love stuff didn’t really arrive in Canada til 1970s. No internet, revolution travelled slowly.

I don’t understand the whole obsession with virginity, me. Sex, when it’s between two consenting adults, (with plenty of lubrication) is a truly beautiful thing.  
Almost makes all the crap you have to put up with as an adult actually worth it.

So why wouldn’t you revel in this delightful aspect of being human? Why keep it under wraps? Sure it has its darker side, but what on Earth doesn’t? How could you deny yourself the sensation, the experience of someone who fills every one of your senses with their beauty? That something so transcendent, wondrous strange and erotic could be had in the midst of the ordinary clutter of the “dustbin pick-up day” and “buying toothpaste at Boots” aspect of life still surprises me. That such lush attraction could just ambush you out of nowhere, all of a sudden-- typical life, that. Always when you least expect it.

So what happened with this bloke—it wasn’t the first time.. I’ve not been a nun since Sy was out of the picture. Sure I felt this way about people before, other men, even the rare woman. I fall into passion easy, obsessions with people overtake me, consume me, usually amount to nothing, burn themselves out. Mostly because the guy’s just someone in a movie and I just fancy a harmless wank without the bother.

But every so often someone walks in and walks out of my life leaving this brand burned deep into my heart, none the wiser for what they done. It’s a unique mixture of emotions; pleasant ache of lust, aesthetic joy of pure pleasure on seeing someone that bloody attractive, someone who turns your crank just so, (it doesn’t happen very often, no typical man will do), combined with the anticipatory sadness of the loss you know is coming,the rejection, the not wanting to let go, not yet anyway, awareness that you’re acting foolish, falling all over yourself like a complete git to flirt with them, but feeling too intense inside to be any other way, knowing just how short life is, to take the chance while you’ve got it.

And then he’ll be gone, leaving me like a kid forced to let go of the bright shiny toy Mum could never afford at the shops. The memory available on replay now, for future, long nights at sea, etc. It’s always different in my mind afterwards. How it comes out— the memory of that brief encounter-- sometimes it’s better, sometimes worse than the original. Always different though. It morphs as you come back to it again and again, erasing all subtlety, any gradations of gray, the way memories do, the entire thing gone high contrast to awesome or horrid with nothing inbetween through the incessant churning of my hamster-wheel mind.  
Romance always reminded me of the crocus flowers in our old front garden, suddenly, spontaneously lush in bloom for a springtime, then withered away overnight.  
And so they stay outside in the garden, never to be brought into the house of my soul. Not since Sy entered and refused to leave, even though his dead petals are drooping, dried up and crumbly into the carpet of my psyche.

Well that’s a nice morbid image, sheesh, how emo can you get?

Usually I prefer it not get messy, more control on my side if I don’t totally give in to it, to the curiosity of “where will this go?”

This time though, this time was different, this guy I could let in, I just felt it, like I wanted him to know me. I mean really know me.  
This random guy who walked into my shop had me standing up straight and tilting to catch the light, making my eyes glow off the reflection in the mirror. I’d watched myself like that, days I was bored in the shop, so I knew the place to stand for the light to catch me at my best.

I thought about what I’d tell him about myself to make me look cool. Who would this one prefer? Shopkeeper me, or the me from the band?  
The me you see on the album covers back in the Fuck-Ups days looks deceptively comfortable wearing strange outfits. Certainly, now I’m too lazy to be bothered. You wouldn’t guess that from the albums, though. Back then I liked the Damned and how their lead singer came on stage dressed like Dracula. It was theatre, simple as. The Fuck-Ups weren’t so extreme as that, didn’t have to call ourselves by different names onstage or anything, but the theatrical nature of it was still there, sure. Looking at our photos from back then is a fucking trip. “Goods n’ Services,” for example. It’s got that whole DIY late 70s punk aesthetic going for it, even though we released it in the 2000s. There’s all that “kidnap writing” with letters that look like torn out pieces of magazines and newspapers, then separate pictures of each of us from the band, made to look like they were ripped from different newspapers and sellotaped together.. I’ve got enough black eyeliner on to shame a raccoon and I’m wearing some kind of odd pleather corset-type thingy that doesn’t quite cover my breasts, that someone, probably Sy, told me to wear because it would “look drama..” My chest is pushed out, and you can see my nipples through the near transparent blouse I’m wearing under the corset as they poke up and over it. I’m wearing black lipstick, as well, another “not me” choice that I think was City’s because she’s got some on too. To top it off I’ve got this bizarre blue fake fur ruff around my neck like a reject from a modern Shakespeare play. My hair is big and teased up and out in a million directions, with (I cringe to mention this on top of all the rest), dyed blonde tips. At least I’m not straddling a drumkit like City is, legs wide apart in fake snakeskin pants, looking like she’s trying to hump her hi-hat. It’s bloody ridiculous, but still even in this get-up, I manage to look dead sexy. Fucking youth, I’ll tell you. I’d like look good in a binliner back then. (No joke, I wore one for a few gigs, as some kind of ultimate anti-fashion statement, but it got too sweaty for comfort). I was really fit, those days, a stone cold fox, if I do say so meself.

Then there’s “Ferry Boat to Nowhere.” For this album we were snapped by an old friend from art school standing in a half sunken row boat off the shores of Greenwich to go with the “ferry boat” theme.

I remember rocking around London with Jams trying to find a second-hand row boat we could knock a hole in for a cheap. Ironically, we’d seen one next to a skip by the Lock just the week before, which gave us the idea for the cover photo. We walked past it every day on our way to the studio. Sy reckoned it’d been lying there for weeks, which was no help to us in the end, because the boat vanished off the face of the planet as soon as we actually had a need for it.  
For this picture I was inexplicably clothed like Cherry Bomb from the Runaways—in tiny shorts, with loops of studded belts around them. This was my conscious homage to Rogue’s look from the 1990s X-men cartoons that I so loved in the day. If this seemed in any way strange, my bandmates didn’t mention it. In this photo my is chest thrust out like the superhero I’m imitating, proudly exposing the furrow of my cleavage to the wan light of a dingy November London sun. You can plainly see what a cold day it is on the Thames because if you look extra close, me and City, who both have our legs bare, have broken out in goose pimples.  
At least Sy is wearing something a little more appropriate for the weather, a black floor length duster coat, buttoned up like Val Kilmner in Tombstone.  
All these years later and that cover still stirs me. Sy’s gaze fixing me to the spot, his head down and to the side, dark eyes just glancing up from beneath his shock of unruly black hair. Charisma, thy name is Sitikantha Ravana Gupta, now trying saying that twice.

He had this incandescent, unearthly beauty even then, this imperious look you wouldn’t be shocked to see staring haughtily down at you from an illuminated manuscript of ancient India, a Rajasthani prince with kohl-traced eyes in a garden of peacocks; superiority, sex and status aimed like an arrow across the ages, coolly lusting from beneath the arches of his golden palace, beyond the reach of time and space.

It’s funny that despite our years together doing ordinary things like shopping and pubbing and puking, the image of him that remains topmost in my mind is that from the album, Sy, my punk prince, with that black duster blown out behind him, the only one not shivering in the frigid October gust off the Thames. I still have the coat, ‘cause it was actually mine to begin with. Sy just borrowed it, although to be honest it always did look better on him.

Me and Jams are the only ones smiling on “Ferry Boat to Nowhere,” grinning like the blooming idiots we were, (and let’s face it, still are). I guess we didn’t read the memo going round that we were supposed to look all brooding and Robert Smith-ish.

Don’t believe me? Check out the album cover yourself and see.

The Fuck-Ups’ albums are there in the shop for anyone who wants to find us, neatly filed under the “F” section. I never recommend them to patrons, though. Not because I’m ashamed, mind, I’m proud of everything we accomplished as a band, but it would just feel too cheesy and self-indulgent to me. The handful of times I’ve seen someone pick one of our CDs up, I always wonder if they’ll recognize me, in spite of the extra weight, change of hair colour and ordinary clothes. So far no one has and I’ve never chosen to fill them in on what they’re missing.

But today was a different sort of day.

I looked up from the book I was reading, Oscar Wilde, introduction to “the Nightengale and the Rose” and that’s when I saw him. Pomegranates bursting into a million seeds in my mind like supernovas in the sky.

I’m looking at him and now I can’t stop staring because he’s the handsomest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.  
I shouldn’t be looking, no I shouldn’t be looking, there was no way I should be looking.  
How old could he be? Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one?

But he’s so beautiful, oh God, so beautiful, it’s almost like an ache in my heart, a physical reaction down below, like I could cream my knickers just glancing, something so tender about the look of his face, the smooth angle of his jaw. How can I explain it? There it was in his dark red ocher eyes, just the thing I was searching for, it seems my entire life.

There’s no bell to the shop or anything. The door is always open if the shop is. Often people come in without me even noticing if I’m deep into a book or online thing, but I was expecting Jams to relieve me, so that’s why I looked up and saw this bloke walk in. And then I was stuck there staring, I could see the light shifting, streaming down into the open space of the Stables, lighting up the back of his hair with a red-gold outline, like a halo in a Renaissance painting.  
As if on cue he looked up at me. His eyes glowed like reddish-brown sugary liquid—like hot tea shot through with sunlight. There was something gentle about the look in his eyes. His skin was fair and his cheeks were very pink, flushed from the cold up to the tips of his ears and he was shivering. He had this cute, floppy overgrown auburn fringe going on with his hair, like a fancy schoolboy, almost the same colour as those glorious eyes.  
Of course he was cold, he was wearing a corduroy jacket in this weather, poor thing! He was only a little taller than me, (and I’m not particularly tall). He bent to look over the CDs, and instantly I wanted to reach up from behind and cover those cold ears with my hands, to feel them heat up at my touch.  
There was so much I wanted to say, I opened my mouth and closed it, too nervous. Be brave Ionee, be brave! If you don’t ask him, you’ll always wonder. Just do it you fuckwad, just do it! Sometimes a firm mental kick in the pants is needed, you know?

I would regret it, I just knew, if I didn’t speak up because this guy, I wouldn’t forget him, not with eyes like that. My Bosie, (certainly if he was as young as he looked—but what sort of teenage boy would wear a corduroy jacket like he did?) It occurred to me, overly dramatic as I am in my mind, that yes, that’s who he was and I was okay with that.

I thought of a Paul Simon song then, one off the Graceland album that went “I thought good gracious, could this be my life?” Except I was never sure if what he actually said was “love” or “life” and maybe he meant both. “If that’s my prayer book, lord let us pray.”

Oh I would get down on my knees and pray to that! My love and my doom sealed at a glance, yes, here it is and I am ready, I thought to myself, as surely as it was the day I sat down beside Sy in the cafeteria at art college.

But all that with Sy was retroactive. I don’t think I realized it that first time, when we met. I was signed up for something before I even knew what it was then, but not anymore. Now I was older and if not wiser, certainly more traumatized and experienced. This time I KNEW what this was and what it would be and this time, once again, I said “fuck it” anyway and leapt straight in.

Fuck my worries and the future, I dove right in in full knowledge and joy at the prospect, that I’d probably crash and burn.  
I cleared my throat.

He gave me a small, courteous smile as he flipped through the CDs and looked at some of the signed memorabilia.

“Looking for something in particular?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, in a voice so ridiculously light and plummy it was like upstairs in fucking Downton Abbey.

I stared. He stood, small, but very straight, in full command of his surroundings, incongruous as they might be for someone dressed like a miniature university professor.

“I’m afraid I don’t really know this type of music very well,” he said. “It’s a birthday present for a friend. We saw this movie—“

I nod like a bloody bobble-head doll, urging him to go on, just wanting to listen to his voice, movie and birthday gift be damned.

“—called ‘Control?’ It was about this band. In Manchester, I think? The singer had epilepsy?”

“Joy Division,” I said, though I could’ve told him that as soon as he said “Control.”

“Yes! That’s the one! I was thinking of the soundtrack maybe or one of the original CDs from the band?”

Now I’m on autopilot talking about music. “Originals are best. You might also want to try New Order, most of the members of the original Joy Division in that group, pretty ground breaking stuff, that, especially for the early 80s, with the new technology, synthesizers and stuff. I’m pretty partial to them myself, but then New Wave’s always been a favourite of mine. Long as your friend doesn’t mind a little four-on-the-floor, right? It’s kind of like techno, but not soulless y’know? Sort of like—“

“Uh, I’m afraid you lost me on ‘four on the floor,’” he said, slight blush.

“Oh,” I say and I think I’m blushing too, because the way he makes it sound, it’s like an orgy reference or something. “That’s just slang for the drum beat, like four of the same note, dun dun dun dun with the pedal, right?”

“You—you played in a band?” he asks.

“Yeah, ages ago. Not drums though, guitar.”

“Really? Is your CD here?”

“I doubt your friend would want it,” I say and duck my head. “We weren’t exactly Joy Division.”

Although come to think of it, we were something like that band when it came to the fate of our lead singer. Only when Sy died we didn’t have the courage or togetherness to re-form ourselves into something else, even better than what we were before, like New Order. No, we just fell apart and fucked up our own separate lives. No Order, that’s what we were.

It didn’t have to be that way. I always thought, if Jams had just been able to stick it out while I recovered and City hadn’t taken the whole crash as some kind of twisted revenge plot on my part, maybe it would’ve turned out differently. If we’d just been able to get over our differences, we could’ve gotten through all the work it took to get me and City healed and back to playing strength again. We could’ve done it together, PT, rehab, whatever it took. Had we stayed together, Jams wouldn’ta fallen the way he did, I just know it… We might’ve even finished V8’s video, Sy or no Sy. Gone on MTV, back when that really made a difference.  
All my usual bogus daydream bullshit, even with this fit guy right in front of me, I still can’t help it.

Focus Ionee, focus.

“Uh… do you give lessons?”.  
“Sure,” I said quick enough, though the only person I ever truly taught was Ocean. “I can give you my number if you’re interested. What’s your name?”

He had his phone out before I even finished the sentence, pressing numbers on the touch screen as he said off handedly, “Seb—Sebastian, actually.”  
Oh! Sebastian! Like Sebastian Flyte in “Brideshead Revisited.” Played by the brilliant Anthony Andrews in the 1981 BBC miniseries. Me and Jams watched the first disc of it about a billion times, especially the part with Sebastian and Charles lying naked on the roof getting tanned. I’d read the first half of the book a dozen times as well. I only ever read the first half of “Brideshead.” The second half, both me and Jams agreed was a lot of tosh about Catholicism and that, so I ripped the book in two and threw that part away years ago. The remaining first half is rather dog-eared from re-reading. And I’m Irons, like Jeremy Irons, who played Charles. It was without a doubt a sign, an omen!

A single clear sentence floated upwards from the inner recesses of my mind like a leaf in a pond:

“This man is the one you are destined to be with forever.”

This statement, I was soon to discover, was absolutely and COMPLETELY INCORRECT in just about every sense it could be. More on that later, though.  
Safe to say at any rate, Sebastian bought the album.

 


	17. Ionee: Who's That Girl?

IONEE ISRALS  
(London, UK)

4\. WHO’S THAT GIRL?

In the end we only had two guitar lessons. The first one was in my shop at the back, while Jams was manning the front. Sebastian was far too distracted by Jams cashing people out and all the customers coming and going to really concentrate on the chords I was trying to teach him. In retrospect it was a bad idea to have the lesson on a Saturday, one of our busiest days of the week. The space in the back was the one we usually used for people who wanted to try on the few clothing items we sold and punters kept eeking in to see what we were up to. It was tiny and cramped and at one point Seb poked me in the boob with the neck of his guitar. I felt bad charging for such an awkward, noisy lesson and told him, but he still paid me, because despite his youth, he was obviously a gentleman.  
For the second lesson he offered to have me over to his, which appealed for obvious reasons. It was a nice place—posh garden flat on Primrose Hill, celebrities next door. Had it all to himself he did, no roomates or parents around. Everything inside well appointed and super tidy like he had a cleaning lady. It reminded me of Jams’ desk in our living room, “a place for everything and everything in its place.” Even the mat by the door was pristine, no discarded shoes in a jumble. In fact, there weren’t any shoes by the door at all. I imagined they were tucked away somewhere in a secret posh people space.   
I pushed off my muddy boots on the mat. The wood floor gleamed dangerously with polish underneath. I made a conscious effort to watch my step as Sebastian led me through a hallway. The walls had real paintings in frames, not prints or random drawings by artsy friends, and a large framed photo of three girls in a garden over the fireplace. I reckon it was done sometime in the 80s, judging by their haircuts and the overuse of soft focus, making the children look like they just appeared out of some ethereal mist or something. Reminded me of that weird lake in that Excalibur movie. Now that you mention it, that was the 80s too.  
I looked down and notice a hole in one of my socks. The floor gleamed aggressively up at me.   
“Your sisters, the girls?” I asked, casually regarding the photo.  
“Two of them,” he said, light and plummy and soft as a feather. “The one in the middle is me.”   
“You? Oh, sorry. The long hair—I just thought you were a—“   
“It’s perfectly all right,” Seb laughed. “I was a girl there.”  
“You were a--? Wha--?”  
“A girl before, yeah.”  
“Oh, uh, right then,” I mutter, feeling shocked and stupid. And then guilty and narrow minded for feeling so shocked and stupid. “I—I didn’t mean to be offensive.” I really didn’t. Sometimes I can just be a little slow on the uptake with these things. It’s just he really really REALLY looked like a guy!  
“It’s okay.” He smiles shyly.   
Now everything feels all strange and awkward, but I try to save it. “You- you don’t look like you’re old enough to’ve grown up in the 80’s.”   
“Uh yeah, thanks,” he says, but I feel like he’s losing patience. “Want to see my guitar?”   
Want to see my…?   
“Guitar, yeah, yeah, brilliant, let’s see your guitar! Oh cool, it’s a Martin, brilliant!” I say, just nattering on like I don’t have two brain cells to rub together.   
Mercifully, we sit down to play and I try to pretend he didn’t just tell me what he told me. I think about it for a bit as he tries to get a handle on the finger spread of the C chord.   
She does have small fingers, I notice. She? I’ve already thought of Seb as a “she,” and his appearance hasn’t changed. He still looks as much like a young man as ever and is concentrating on his playing. You’d think someone “open minded” like me wouldn’t get flustered over something like that, but I was just surprised by it, that’s all.   
All right, that’s a lie. That isn’t all. To tell the truth I’m seriously beginning to reconsider my “try to seduce Sebastian” scheme. I also want to ask him like a million question that are problem super offensive about the true nature of his junk.  
But I’m just sitting here like an arse, trying to teach him “I Fought the Law,” (“Bet you didn’t know it was first recorded by the Bobby Fuller Five, not the Clash,” I say to him, chalk full of useless trivia), but the whole time I’m wondering like a complete cunt what he’s packing down there, like if he has a penis or a vagina or some other kind of type organ. Is he fully transitioned? I heard people talking about it once, at the shop. Like what the hell does that mean anyway? I try to recall passing mentions of this from the internet, but come up with a blank. And now, like an utter twat, I find myself staring guiltily at his crotch as he tries to switch his fingering from chord to chord. I look away, a little freaked out by my own curiosity and overwhelming desire to ask annoying questions. I have to say I’m intrigued, but I’m not sure if it’s in a sexual way or something else entirely. Control yourself, Ionee. Jesus Christ.   
Am I a jerk because now I’m not sure about this whole scheme to seduce him, now that I’ve found out? I mean it’s not like I’m perfect or anything. Or was this whole scheme kind of jerky to begin with? Trying to seducing a person only, what eight years older than Ocean in appearance, one I thought was barely out of secondary school, I mean what the hell?   
We wrap up the lesson and thirty quid changes hands. Now I’m walking towards the door about to put on my shoes, when my right foot goes completely numb, no warning. I step down and it’s like nothing’s alive on the end. Of all the times to… aw fuck me. Bloody hell. Just had to do it here, didn’t you?  
I slide down to the floor so I can sit and massage some feeling back into it. Considering it was half sheered off at the ankle by the gas peddle in the crash eight years ago, it’s surprising it works at all. If it gets like that they used to tell me to squeeze and kneed it a bit until the sensation returns. Doing this moves the scar tissue away from the nerves or something, I guess, not that I’m a doctor or really understand any of it. Though it tends to go all painful and pins and needlesy for a while when the feeling starts returning, before it settles again. Stupid thing’s well annoying. Stiff in the morning, aches at night. Already I’m starting to get arthritis in it and I’m only 36, lovely state of affairs that.   
“What’s wrong?” Seb asks, auburn eyebrows bunched in concern.   
“Heh, just my foot.”  
“Gone to sleep has it?”  
“More like a fucking coma.”  
He looked back at me, affronted. Language, children.   
“I injured it a while back in a car crash, it’s just a bit of nerve damage, that’s all.”   
“Oh dear, that doesn’t sound fun. Do you need to ice it?”   
“No, it’s fine, there’s no swelling or anything, it just happens every once in a while. Do you mind if I sit here for a bit until it comes back online?”  
“Sure. Wait oh no I’m so sorr really, but you can’t. I have to lock up and get to a meeting with a client in an hour.”  
“Oh,” I say wearily as I start putting on my shoes. It’s odd and unpleasant when you can’t feel one of them go on. I try and think where I can sit nearby outside until I’m okay to walk to the bus stop. I can’t remember if there was grass or some bench or what.   
“Look, maybe I can give you a lift. Where do you need to go to?”   
“Willesden Green tube station. I live right next to it.”  
“Brilliant, that’s not too far and I’m taking the car to the meeting anyway.”  
“Are you sure it’s not out of your way?”  
“It’s fine. Seriously.”   
“Okay,” I say, both shoes on now.   
Seb gives me a hand up and I walk. It’s a funny feeling, like there’s layers of padding wrapped around my foot and anything it touches can only be felt in some vague, indistinct way. Every time it happens I get scared, like maybe it’ll just stay dead this time and never come back. I try to calm myself down as there is obviously a foot beneath my ankle and I am somehow moving it, and it has give and softness when I put it down, but there’s no characteristically smooth, flat feeling of “floor” beneath the sole at all. It’s disturbing the way your senses and your eyes can go into conflict like that. I reckon this must be a bit what it’s like to be on acid or something, the whole senses being out of kilter thing. Syntheasia. I should ask Jams, he’d know. I mean who even knew that “floor” was an actual feeling?   
I limp down the steps after Seb, feeling the pins and needles sensation starting to heat up. Yup, back online again. We approach Sebastian’s blue Mini Cooper squeezed into the alleyway cheek to jowl with an elderly black Renault the Top Gear lads would most certainly turn up their noses at. It hurts and burns now, but at least I can feel it again.


	18. Ionee: In Cars

5\. IN CARS

Seb’s blue mini is spotless. It sparkles like it’s come straight off the lot. Inside the light brown leather interior is pristine. I click in my belt and the scent of “new car” wafts up around me.   
I don’t know if it was my foot conking out that started me in that direction or what, but as soon as the smell hits my nostrils I’m feeling the windows and doors start to move in towards me, closing in like they’re going to crush me inside like the Star Wars trash compactor and…   
NO!   
Suddenly, I can’t breath. I need to get out, get out, get out, but I’m frozen, stuck to the seat, held in place by some unbreakable force.   
No, no force. It’s that smell!   
The Silver Bullet, the gray 2007 Toyota MR2 Roadster Convertible. The one from LA.   
The locks on the doors click down as Seb continues to drive. The windows are very close around me now. In my head I say what Cammy taught me, this technique she learned in therapy to stop panic attacks. This has happened before, it’ll happen again. It’s nothing to be alarmed about. You’re not back there anymore. The feeling will pass. There’s no emergency. Breath… one, two, three, four… No emergency. It’s okay.   
Secretly, I want to bitch-smack the patronizing voice in my head.   
Liar! It is NOT fucking okay!  
The whole thing with the flashbacks is even stupider, when you realize, as I do at the moment, that I remember no actual specific details about what happened right before or during the crash in California and only disjointed snippets from the time I spent crushed in a sandwich of crumpled metal and windscreen glass at the bottom of a canyon, but I suppose those small fragments of memory really stuc and I just filled in the rest with a way too vivid imagination.  
It’s not even just the new car smell that does it. Even the sound of a babbling brook continus to fill me with dread, a fact I unpleasantly discovered after buying a “Nature Sound Sleep Aid" off Amazon. Needless to say it did NOT help me sleep.  
How this car remains in such good nick I do not know, as Sebastian clearly doesn’t know how to drive the thing worth a damn. Is it just me or did he really swerve to miss that shifty geezer on what looks like a motor bike stolen offar Indian take-away?   
Oh my God, when is this drive going to end? Can it get any worse?  
Of course it can! Because now the bike stealing take-away guy flicks us the reverse V in the rearview mirror and is cutting out in front like we couldn’t completely flatten him with a car if Sebastian doesn’t hit the breaks tout suite.   
No, it’s just you imagining Sebastian’s driving badly, I tell myself. Just doing your usual freak out routine again. Sure he’s a really great driver. It’s all in your head, your distorted perspective and—  
WHAT THE FUCK? THE LIGHT IS GREEN! WHY ARE YOU NOT MOVING, JUST READING THAT BLOODY MOVIE POSTER OFF A BUS SHELTER? DRIVE YOU FUCKING CUNT! DRIVE!   
Ask, yourself, what’s the worst case scenario? I tell myself, trying to remember that “Coping with Anxiety” audio thingy I downloaded online.  
I thought about the worst case scenario. It involved copious amounts of pain and death. My brain melted from the sheer horror and anxiety of it all. I tried to pull myself together, gripping the inner handle of the car door like a life preserver staring at the three small scars on the back of my hand that form the pattern of a happy face. It’s calming to trace them in my head. Two eyes, side by side, the long one is a mouth, twisted in a “quietly laughing inside at the unceasing absurdity of the world” sort of expression. Or at least it is in my fancy …   
“I usually only drive this beauty out in the country when I go to visit my family in Sussex,” continues Seb conversationally as if my stomach’s not turning inside out and I haven’t sweated through the armpits of my “The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society” T-shirt. I feel this must be anxiety sweat made of corrosive, extra stinky acid or something because I can smell it, as my shirt clings to my back, mingling with eau d’new car. Does Sebastian even realize how hard it is to get a Kinks T-shirt, even in London? Every shitty tourist stand in the market has a Beatles, Bob Marley or Rolling Stones one, but very few have the Kinks, which in my opinion are the superior band. How can there be shirts of the Sex Pistols and Johnny Cash giving someone the finger, but no shirts of--  
“Everything in London’s so close together,” he continued rabbiting on. “I just don’t see the point of driving most of the time, do you?”  
“Blerg,” I choke out some kind of syllable that makes no sense. Of COURSE, I don’t see the point of driving, unless I’m intentionally trying to give myself a heart attack. Haven’t driven since the accident.   
“BLERG!”   
“Uh, yeah,” he says, as if I’ve actually said an English word and keeps on going.   
How is he not aware I’m having a heart attack here? Maybe if I had some water it wouldn’t be so bad. I unclench my left hand from its death grip on the seat cushion and force it into my rucksack, feeling around for the Nestea bottle I’ve been using as water bottle for the past two days.  
I try to unscrew the top, to get at the precious nectar inside, but my hands are sweaty and shaking. I can’t get a fucking grip!  
Seb, (fucking bitch why won’t you slow the fuck DOWN!) is still merrily hitting the gas like he/she’s driving the bloody Dakarta Rally and all I can think is I’m going to fucking die here and Ocean’s going to be an orphan and have to live my parents and my parents will be disappointed in me, dying in a car crash with a fucking tranny or whatever a girl to boy trans is called anyway and I’ll never get to tell Jams that I love him even if he’ll never have sex with me because he’s not that way and what if heaven really is for real, like that creepy book says and I meet Sy and he tells me to fuck off and he still hates me for what happened and he thinks I killed him on purpose—and—and—Oh my God, I’m dying…I CAN’T FUCKING BREATH!  
“SEBASTAIN!” I gasp out before I suffocate. “SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!”  
"Pardon?” he looks over at me, stupid red-brown eyebrows the colour of tepid tea, eyebrow bunched together in dumb concern.   
“LOOK AT THE BLOODY ROAD!” I scream at him.  
“Oh, right,” he says and gives me a funny look as he slams on the brakes a centimeter away from the Vauxhall in front of us sitting minding its own business at the red. I squirm with discomfort as the speedy deceleration slams me back down in my seat and feel the jolt go straight through my bad foot.  
“What? What’s wrong?” he asks.   
“You almost got us killed!"  
“No I didn’t! He stopped short. How was I to—“  
And now the cars are moving again. I realize I seriously wouldn’t mind walking home, no matter how long it took or how sore it made me. At least then I’d be sure to get there in one piece! No ache or numbness in my foot or previously held desire to fuck this crazed ginger motorist was worth THIS.   
“Red light!” I exclaim and we pull up with a screech.  
“Oh, thanks, almost missed that,” he says, nonplussed. Meanwhile, my anxiety is plussing all over the sodding shop. I’m actually trembling, shaking like a leaf by this point. Still, I try to stay calm and reasonable and talk to him like a normal human being.   
“Listen, Seb, I did tell you how this happened to me, didn’t I?”  
“How what happened to you?”  
“How I buggered up my ankle.”  
“Skiing accident? Oh no, wait, that was Claire from Australia."  
Who the fuck is Claire from Australia?  
“What happened?” he asks obliviously as he vaults over a kerb right in front of Swiss Cottage, nearly pulverizing a compost bin along the way.   
No fucking way.  
“STOP THE CAR!” I scream.   
He pulls into the bus lane, looking puzzled. “What’s the matter?”  
“This is great!” I say tightly. “Right here! This is fine!”  
“I thought, I just remembered--” crap, what did I just remember? The blue and silver sign of the Odeon looms into view through the drizzling rain outside the window. “Oh—ah, got to meet a mate at the cinema. Movie!” I say nodding. I am vaguely aware that I'm barely sensible,talking in single word sentences. “Cinema! Date! Popcorn!”   
“Oh, well all right then,” he says, looking puzzled. “As long as you’re alright.”  
“Alright! Yes! I’m fine! Go on! Bye now! Thanks!” I smile and nod with desperate relief as he goes into park.   
FINALLY.  
I push at the handle. No, wait, got to unlock the door first, I’m that eager to get out. I pull up the lock THEN do the handle, press it. The door bursts open.   
FRESH AIR! AT LAST!  
The breeze is a cool caress on my face and immediately I feel a million times better.  
I grab my rucksack and stumble towards the kerb my foot still half-numb, but carrying me alright. Not looking back, willing Seb with his psycho driving and horrible demon car to go away forever. I am swaying like a drunk as I hoobble around the corner of the building towards the alleyway behind the Gold Ribbon Café.  
“Thanks for the lesson!” he calls after me from behind his windscreen as he speeds of to certain death.  
Thank the fuck he's gone!   
I duck behind a dustbin and vomit.


	19. City: They Smelled Like Pubs and Wormwood Scrubs

FELICITY “CITY” MARTINGALE  
(London, UK)

6\. “They smelled like Pubs and Wormwood Scrubs” 

So here I am back in London, thinking like I always do in London: What the fook am I doing here?  
I’m sleeping at a hostel near King’s Cross station with a million fooking tourists. If any a these fookers asks me how the hell to get to platform 9 and three quarters or mentions anything Harry Potter related again, I’m going to go medieval on their arse like Samuel Jackson. Won’t count meself responsible, I swear.   
Why am I in this fooking HOSTEL? Don’t I know anyone in London anymore? Don’t I have any fookin’ friends? I only lived here six years, right? And no friends around abouts willing to put me up, let me kip for the night. What’s this place fooking coming to, I ask you? Fooking figures.   
But why’m I here, here in London you ask?   
To visit me bruv in prison.   
That’s right. Wormwood Scrubs Prison, famous former inmate being Lord Alfred Douglas ex-boyfriend of writer Oscar Wilde. Why'd that pop into my head at a time like this, eh? Thank Ionee and Jams. Sharing a van on tour with those two was like some bizarre course in poof writers no one except uni students cares about anymore, filling up my headspace with more useless crap. The result, I now know way too much about shite that means nothing. Why a punk-ass kike and some Armenian battyman find anything so fooking meaningful in the writings of a bunch of fudge packing arse-bandits is beyond me. Sy never understood the appeal. Had no tolerance for that sort of puffed up patronizing shite. He could tell you where to get off, could Sy.  
Wish he were here now to go with me to this fooking clink. He’d have some sly word about this or that, Sy. Make you crack up in the grimmest of situations, man had a gift for making you laugh, give ‘im that at least.  
I still can’t believe it, me own bruvver in fooking Wormwood Scrubs. Fooking embarrassment, him. The name of the place's a laugh, sounds like a character from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." Used to love me that film as a kid. One of the two VHS tapes we owned til Tyrone broke it, pulling all the shiny tape out, like it were bleeding all over the carpet in the den. If me bruvvers made that film it would be all football factory not chocolate. Ha ha ha. It does look like a factory of sorts, standing outside. That or some bellend’s idea of a castle.   
And get this, it’s got “grade II listed building status.” They listed a prison. A fooking prison. One still in use. Slow day at the historical board, eh? Soon they’ll run out of actual buildings to list and start putting down historical loos. Come see the great loo of Waterloo Station! George Michael got a blow job in these very toilets! Only, wait, that ain’t true, cause them toilet’s’re in LA, they told us on the bus tour, innit? Only me n’ Sy was wasted, so I’m not sure I remember right. Anyway, there was a song that had the name of that prison in it. Something by the Jam I think. Ah, there it is—“Going Down in the Tube Station at Midnight” that’s it. Get your fooking mind outta the gutter, it’s not about going down on someone like that. No, it’s about a guy getting beat up in a tube station for his take away curry, least I think so. Or it could’ve been his money and the take-away curry was just a bonus. I forget.  
Of course people wouldn’t get away with that shit today, CCTV sees all, which is how they fingered me bruv, Tyrone. Him and Max they was working construction here in London, improvements to the O2 or Millenium Village or some-it and went down the pub to watch the football like they do back at home back. And everybody’s having some drinks and some chav slags him off for being a Sheffield supporter and, (least according to him), he just takes it. Then a group of guys start disrespecting him and his mates. They start dissing them back and there’s some shoving and spilled beer, crisps all over the bar and that.  
So Tyrone’s group says “Oi, you gotta pay for that mate. Spilled our fucking beer innit?”  
And the landlord says, “take that shite outside chaps and you owe me for three packets of Walkers.” And me bruv and his mates all kicked out unfairly on account they won’t pay for the crisps. So they wait for the other guys outside to come out, watching from across the high street at the Chinese take-away. Finally, them chavs are outta the pub and they go after ‘em. Just to mess with them a little, retaliation for getting them tossed out, innit? Sort of shite that happened a million times at home, no big deal. It was nothing, really nothing. I’ve mixed with Tyrone in that sort of stuff before and me other bruvvers Kenneth and Maxwell. Actually, Maxwell was there as well though he only got a few days time in the clink for it. Look I know me bruvs, okay? They enjoy a row but they’d never try to kill some nonce like that just for taking the mick.  
So they’re just starting to row and Tyrone punches this one big bugger and the guy just falls back and hits his head on a fooking lamppost-- a fooking lamppost, seriously! So you know, of course they scarper, but then it turns out the guy they hit, they really hurt him. Hit him in some weird spot on his head so it bled into his brain. There was “lasting damage” or so those lawyer cunts say. So now Tyrone’s in jail. But it weren’t really his fault. Could’ve happened to anyone, could’ve happened to me even—I used to go scrap with them when we’d get into rows with rival club supporters back in the day. Me bruvvers—they’d hold a guy for me when I was little and let me get a few kicks in for shites and giggles. Good old days. People still do that anymore? The whole football firm thing?   
Sy never liked it. Used to say “That scene is so fucking played. Your bruvs are like walking cliches."  
Except not exactly like clichés, me bruvvers, because in clichés it’s all in good fun and nobody ends up brained or dead or that. I mean you see the good guys knock the baddies on the head all the time on telly and it never happens like that. I used to watch Remington Steele like crazy when I was young because I was into Pierce Brosnan and the Stephanie Zimbalist chick on that show-- she’d clock some bad dude over the head unconscious every episode! Don’t tell me the filth ever came to throw her in jail for manslaughter or anything cause the guy never woke up or sued cause of brain damage.   
I bought some Strongbow at the corner shop and drank it before going in. Just a little fortification before I head on down to the lock-up. Okay, maybe another is in order. This shite just don’t get easier.  
By the time I rock up to the jail I’m only moderately sober. A mistake, that, but the only thing that gives me the control I’ll need is a bit of booze and the booze is one thing I have trouble controlling. Though I supposed if I was full pissed they wouldn’t let me in, so give me credit, I held off a little.  
The visit starts off okay. I tell him his new tattoos look flash, ‘though it’s a lie, cause they actually look just like bog standard prison shite, but I can’t think of nuffing else to say. Probably crawling with unclean virus bacteria and all that bullocks Ionee and her fooking sisters was always nattering on about—blah blah blah infection control and all that shite. But in his case he might be smart to have a care. People have AIDS in here pro’lly Hep C, as well and that, they say, is easier to get.  
He asks about Maxwell and Kenneth, who I confess are wankers because they don’t come to see him and it could’ve been any a’ them here instead of him, only Tyrone was the one caught holding the ball when the music stopped, possibly cause he’s always been the daftest of the three, but I try to be comforting, y’know?   
“Bad luck, that’s all. I can relate."  
He nods, we commiserate. Now what? I don’t think I ever sat in a room with just him talking for this long without any distractions. No game to cheer at on the telly or porn to watch or pint to toss back. No Maxwell, Kenneth, Mum or any of her flavor of the month boyfriends to get up in our business. Conversation’s just dead man, nothing to nudge it toward more interesting waters. Time drags on.   
“You ever play the drums anymore?” he asks me out of the blue.   
What the HELL?   
Still, I keep me temper. Remember, he’s just trying to make conversation. Not his fault he’s stuck in here with nuffing from the outside world to talk about.  
“No, no,” I say pleasant as can be, trying like they says in that one therapy thing I done “to make light of the situation.” “Remember when I pawned me kit? Ain’t going to play with this mitt right?” I hold up me left hand to remind him, ha-ha, like he’d ever forget that messed up sight.   
I only got a thumb and two fingers stuck on half of me palm, the rest of the hand’s gone. Sometimes it still feels like all five fingers’re there, tingling and itching me, like weird ghost fingers in me mind. Creeps the fooking shit outta me, I’ll tell you. The ones I still got there don’t look or feel natural either, reconstructed out of what the doctors could scrape together after the crash, (not accident, no, it were never by accident). You ever hear the term “de-gloved?” It’s like removing a glove, except the “glove” in this case is your fooking skin. Anyway, that’s what happened to me. The skin on that hand is a graft, replaced with skin they took off the back of my thigh and arse.   
And it’s pure graft for sure, I’ll tell you that, what I had to pay those fooking cocksuckers to have this done to me in some bloody shite-rate American hospital, and it still looks crap, not like a normal hand at all, no fingernails and can barely move worth a damn. I can sort of curl it in and hold shit with it, but it’s fooking weak, not to mention ugly to look at it.   
“Oh,” he said. “I just wondered you still could. Betcha people would pay to see that, eh?”  
Yeah, I just bet they would, you fooker. People’re weird like that. Some enjoy the freakish stuff. Sexually, as well. Wotevah. Me, I don’t judge, long as the money’s good. But the drum kit’s sold, bruvvah, end of story. Fooking blood claht should know that shite’s a sensitive subject with me, eh?  
“Listen, anyone here tried to do ya up the bum yet?” I ask cheerily, trying to change the subject. That gets a dirty look, but he don’t rise to the bait.  
“Nah, I’m hanging onto me soap in the shower.”  
“Well done you, but keep me posted if you change your mind and turn battyman,” I say and flash me best smile.   
“You shouldn’t use that kind of slang,” he says all high and mighty alla sudden. “That’s what all these black guys in here say—batty man this and blahd claht that-- It’s fooking disgusting, way those black bastards talk.” This says Tyrone, the super-white cunt with the super-black name.   
I shrug and do my best Bob Marley. “Whaaaaahhhht-evah mahn. One love, innit?”  
“Quit taking the piss. Oi, you ain’t still hanging about with that kike and that towelheaded homo anymore, eh?”   
“Ah, no, kike with the mike’s gone. Jams” I will NOT dishonor his memory by calling him a towelhead, specially since it’s bloody well inaccurate, innit—“he ain’t in the picture anymore.”   
“Good. That band, Fuck’eads or whatever you used ta call it—glad you’re out of that shit.”  
“You mean the Fuck-ups? Jeez, have a brain cell why don’t you? You think I be caught dead with anything that bitch Ionee was involved with? Come ON, Ty, she’s the one wot drove our fooking motor off a bloody mountain and you better believe I ever see that cunt again, I’d tell’er where to shove it. Better believe you seen the last of her.”  
“Good, yeah? Don’t want me little sis under the bad influence, roight? Them Jews and browns and Muslim cunts, trying to take over this country, innit? Marry into us, corrupt our blood from the inside. Glad you never got with that other one, that Paki one, them birds used to go gaga over. What’s his name?”  
“Sy you mean?” Although, really the current bloke I’m banging is ten shades darker n’ im, but if you think I’m telling me bruvvah that, you best believe I got a death wish.  
“Fooking Sy, yeah! Good thing you guys never married and none of that. What kind of fucked up halfbreed kids you’d a’ had with that little brown shit I can’t imagine.”   
I freeze cause I can well imagine— oh God, I can imagine that. Me and Sy and our little babies. They would’ve been beautiful. Little B-beautiful.   
And suddenly my skin is crawling, like I want to jump straight out of it and not just on the bad hand, but all over. I need a drink, I need a fooking drink. Fook the drink, I need something stronger. I need… I wanna to be sedated… don’t want to feel this fooking pain. Not anymore. Not again. Skin crawling and crawling, cold prickles down me back and shoulders, sweat under the bra straps.   
How’d Tyrone know? How’s he always know just what buttons to press? Even when we was kids, he could always get to me. A bloody sixth sense for cruelty, him.  
Suddenly, I want to kill him-- reach over there and tear his fucking throat out. I can picture it—full colour, dangling from my hand Mortal Kombat!--Subzero Wins! But he’s just poking me for some reaction, innit? Just trying to get rid of the boredom. Like the time we went to the seaside at Blackpool and he just kept on jabbing and jabbing that jellyfish til it fooking burst… A complete arse all his life, him. Wants to watch me dance for his amusement? Let’s see how the fooker likes it hisself.  
Obviously me bruv’s glommed onto some white power Aryan Nation, BNP, National Front bullshit in here. Maybe just for protection, who knows? He’s still me bruv, just now he’s buying into a bunch of neo-fascist Nazi crap so maybe no one shivs him in the shower. Not that I judge. Listen, I’ll be first to tell you, a person’s got to do some fooked up shite to survive in this world sometimes, but it kind of makes me ill that he’s actually believing that crap now, no pose or anything, but then weren’t he always dumb as shite, him?  
And how DARE he talk smack about Sy. Like he could ever understand love? Him? Sitting there, head shaved, looking like a giant tattooed baby? Don’t make me fooking laugh.   
“Now which one was it tried to top hisself? The fudge-packer roight? That’s right,” he says, eyes half-closed, like he’s totally not realizing he’s baiting me, just oh-so casual, uh-huh, I’m onto you man. “He ever actually go through with it?”   
He ever actually go through with it?… My whole body’s gone shivery now, like the bad hand, ghosts of friends and fingers in my nervous system. I’m in the bloody car again, seven years ago, upside down, hand crushed and sheered half off under the door. Jams is there with his face next to mine, cheeks white like that guy from the Damned in goth make-up, ‘cept for the real blood trickling down the side of his face. More blood on his lips and in his mouth. He mumbles through knocked out teeth and blood: I’m going to get help! Maybe that other car’s still there, that old chap, I sawr him in the driver’s seat, could’ve remained at the scene, phoned the ambulance, maybe, I’ll get help, don’t worry City. Everything’s under control. A laugh bubbles up from somewhere deep inside. So sensible in emergency, him. So fooking crazy all other times. Opposite of normal people, Jams is. I nod to him, though I’m hanging upside down, so I guess this makes some topsy turvy kind of sense. There weren’t no pain in the beginning, only I was suddenly very cold and shivering, my mind beginning to recede, distant from the shite around me.   
“Don’t die City,” moans Jams and I want to laugh, like c’mon, seriously? I’m fine! But somehow, me tongue is thick. “Promise you won’t die!”   
Fook’s sake, he sounds about three years old, eyes so big, like Mummy, mummy, promise! Like I’m gonna take his money for school dinners. Seriously?  
“Don’t be daft, y’ big baby.”   
“Don’t worry, City you’ll be okay, you’ll be okay.” He’s babbling full stop and I just wished he’d shut the fook up and let me sleep. I thought I might have a broken arm. It felt funny. I tried to wiggle out of the wreckage and a horrible pain shot through my hand and hips and belly and groin. AGONY, fooking AGONY, like I was having a baby or someit.  
Worst pain I ever felt in me fucking life. It hurt so much it made me vomit, puke running down into me face, in my eyes, over my hair, mixing with tears. I am fooking CRYING! That’s what got me the most, ‘cause I never fooking cry. Tears are for twats and babies, not for me.  
“Ssssshhhh, City, you’ll be okay. Relax, it’s going to be all right.” He tried to touch me, to rub my arm. It felt like fire.  
“STOP IT! GET THE FOOK AWAY!” I screamed at him and I watched him scramble away, up and out of the canyon, shouting back, promising he’d get help for me and Ionee. For me and Ionee? What about Sy? Why wouldn’t he get help for Sy too?   
That time I spent trapped in the car, I was awake for most of it. Each minute when you’re like that, goes on and on for hours, for days. I remember it all, every second, just waiting for Jams to come back, shouting for him, for Sy, for Ionee, for anyone, half insane thinking they was all either dead or laughing behind those scruffy California bushes leaving me here to die alone.   
Later, I woke up to Jams’ face. I was still trapped in the car, still in pain, but Jams was there again, trying to comfort me, still saying “City, it’s all right, you’ll be okay” and those A and E types there with the stretchers, weirdly looking like actors, fit Californian blokes, like they belonged on Baywatch or someit and I reckoned I wasn’t going to die there ‘cause I still wanted to bone this blonde haired EMT, but wearing that perfectly ironed paramedic shirt so tight I had to reckon he was probably a fudge packer, so too bad, y’know?   
People say oh City, she’s bad news, yeah? Well blah blah blah and fook ‘em on a Friday, they don’t know what I come up from or where I been. Like Tupac said, “Only God can judge me” or someit. Let them judge theirselves, I don’t got no regrets for nuffing I done.   
Okay, I tell a lie, one exception and that’s what happened with Jams. Because after Sy died and me and Ionee ended up in hospital he was all by hisself. None of us to be there for him, tell him what he told me that day in the Canyon when he saved my life, tell him “It’s all right Jams, you’re going to be okay.” Me, I had no time for him, didn’t want to see him. Didn’t want to see no one. Sure I was hurting, but it don’t make it right. We wasn’t there for him when he needed us. And with out us, he found someone else. And like that person, even I could see he was bad news, but I didn’t say or do nothing. Nah, just felt glad someone was finally taking Jams off me hands and outta town where he couldn’t be a bovver and I kind of forgot about him. Out of sight, out of mine, y’know?  
So yeah, so years later Ionee, she called me and I hung up on the bitch because you know. Fooking slag. How she get this number? She belled me back, again and again, but I didn’t pick up. Turned off the phone. Let her stew in that, the gimpy cunt..  
But then, a week later, me mum, who never visited me once in fooking hospital, and is now ragging on me 24/7 cause I ain’t paying her rent on this fooking box room in me own family home, she’s complaining, can’t get in touch or leave me a message, box’s full. Not like I want to hear from her, but there’s this bloke I got me eye on from the Job Centre… anyway, now I got to listen to all me messages and delete ‘em. So I end up hearing some of what Ionee has to say, just by chance, y’know?   
Her voice’s thick with crying like a bad actress on Corrie. It didn’t sound real, like she was putting it on. How the fook was I to know?   
“Oh, City, you have to come. Please come! It’s Jams. I’m not sure he’s going to make it. I’m flying to America tonight, whether you decide to come or not. City, his throat was SLIT! There are other wounds on his arms, knife wounds. They’re not sure who did it, whether it was Jams himself or someone else" she’s crying now, but like I said, kinda fakely y'know?   
"He was dumped in front of Ochsner Medical Centre in New Orleans. That’s Ochsner Medical Centre, O-C-H-S-N-E-R Medical for when you come. 15-14 Jefferson Highway. You can look it up. Cabs probably know where it is anyway. They think maybe he tried to…to top himself,” she sobbed, gave me her mobile number and then the answerphone beeped and she was gone.   
Who says that? "Topped" like they’re on telly or something? But that’s what she said, echoing forever on the machine like I could still hear it going, bad fibreoptics or something, echoing in my head even after I erased it.   
So don’t fooking judge me, ‘kay?   
Yeah, I erased it. So bloody what? Erased that message and all the rest after it, which were Ionee too, saying much of the same.  
Maybe if it weren’t Ionee, I don’t know, maybe there wasn't that row between us I wouldn’t’ve erased the message. Instinct, reflex. Whatever. I just had to let all that shit go. You get it, roight? Like I just had to forget it. Don’t go back. Don’t let that it cling on, pull you down like gum ona bottom of your shoe. There’s only so much pain one person can handle. I got enough strife for one life, me. Fook’em. So yeah, I erased the message. Easiest thing I ever done.  
Except…  
After…  
I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Like a fucking weight on the heart, every day, every day! The guilt and the not knowing, not wanting to know, then changing me mind, wanting to know. Wanting to understand how he did it and why. Thinking, thinking did he survive? I don’t think he did. In my heart it feels like he’s probably dead. I could feel it, death through the wires, the way Ionee was talking on the phone. That’s the odds of it, innit? I could find out for sure, look online for the obit, but I don’t want to confirm it. I’m a fooking chickenshit ain’t I?  
Better to just pretend it’s not the case, that he’s still wandering around out there, chilling in Regent Park playing the Strangler’s (ironic name, that), “Golden Brown,” shaking his little Armenian ass for the posh set at the Green Carnation on a Saturday night or busking in Trafalgar Square.   
Them’s the breaks, how the cookies crumble, it is what it is-- pick your own crap phrase ‘bout the whole shit-show I don’t care. I know I fooking lost the plot with him. Jams didn’t deserve that. He saved me life, piece of shit wot I am. And me, I just tossed him aside like yesterday’s rubbish.   
“See, it’s good you got away and forgot about them, got back with the right types now. Look what those fookers did to you, me poor little sis,” Tyrone says and reaches across the table for the bad hand.   
I flinch like a fooking weakling. “Chrissakes, Tyrone what you doing?”  
“Come on luv, for old time’s sake,” he says and puts up his hands for me to squeeze. We used to do this, like when we were little kids and that-- hold our hands up together, palm to palm and just squeeze, like really hard with all our strength. Don’t know why, it just felt good. We weren’t into hugs or cuddles, not us lot. This was sort of our version, which is why I can’t refuse him, the daft cunt. Can’t have much contact in here, other than non-con, can he, poor sod. We squeeze with both hands, but he takes care to be gentle with my bad one. I give him a feeble clutch back with it, which is the best I can do.   
“Hey, getting stronger there,” he says with a grin. I don’t think so, but I appreciate the sentiment, him trying to make me feel a little better.   
Me and Jams, we used to hold hands all the time together, making like we was a couple, keep people from slagging him off about being a gay. Or maybe we both just liked it. Whatever, we were just so beautiful, we could get away with anything. I liked the way people looked at me when I was with him, like, oh, look at her she can pull a guy like that, she’s gotta be something special. Prolly the same for him, walking hand in hand with hot little me in Little Armenia off Fairfax in LA, getting those special Easter pastries from the Armenian bakery, Jams so excited to have them again, missing the way his mum made them back home in London.  
“So anyways,” Tyrone goes on, “I was wondering you could do me a favour, like when you get back home.…”  
“Yeah?” I don’t like where this is going.  
“Yeah, see, Christina’s not been writing me back lately. I sent her two lettahs and she’s not sent back the one.” His fiancé, the Polish Princess. Great, just great. “I was worried, you know what I’m saying?. I was wondering, maybe you could look around, ask around when you’re back in Sheffield, what she’s been up to, who she’s been seen with, is going out with—you know what I mean? See her last lettah, it was kind of, I don’t know, kind of, distant, you know what I’m saying?”  
Distant? Really? That’s what you’re going to go with arsehole?   
“Yeah.” No fooking wonder, arsehole, as your Princess’s gone back to shagging the same bricklayer from Lodz she was banging before she met you when you was working as a bouncer at that titty bar hoping you was her meal ticket out of there.   
But hey, what’s he going to do about it from in here anyway? Just stir him up's all it would do. The thought of it makes me smile. At least I’ll have a little entertainment today maybe, make this whole boring trip worth the while.  
“Oi, Tyrone, I don’t got to spy on ‘er for you.”  
“Please, City--”  
“I don’t got to spy on’er cause I already know she got back together with her old boyfriend. Lemme see what’s his name? Tomas.” I make sure to pronounce the “mas” like mash and draw it out, real Polish like, just to rile him extra hard. This is almost too easy. “Yup, that’s it.”  
He squints at me.  
Oh my God! Is he trying not to cry or someink? Suckah!  
“You don’t know fook-all about it, you’re just having a go. That’s all. You don’t know nuffink.”  
“Having a go? Heh, you wish. Why’d I want to do that?” Why indeed. Could it be he’s an utter cunt and that’s why? Nah. Heh heh. “She’s running around on you, bruv. Better you find out now, innit?”  
From across the table he gives me a push. “Hey now, don’t get all emotional about it! I’m just the bleeding messenger here.”   
“You’re talking fooking rubbish! She ain’t seeing no one! She never done!”  
“Oi, watch it, don’t get all argy bargy with me! Look, just call the slag, ask her yourself.”  
“GET THE FOOK OUT!” he roars at me, like the impotent fooker he is, like a neutered toothless pitbull barking it's stupid head off from behind a fence.   
“You’re pathetic,” I sneer back, Sid Viscious style, as the guard nearby grabs him.   
He tries to shake the guy off. Stupid move. The screw conks him with his baton, but Tyrone’s big skull is thick and he don’t go down easy.   
“I told you she was a fucking slapper when you met ‘er,” I tell him. “Tiger don’t change her stripes, bruv. Not me fault you was never one to listen to reason.”   
More guards outside now, feet pounding down the corridor. The one holding Tyrone gives me a dirty look, ‘cause we both know I’m just winding him up. I grin at them both. Suck on that arseholes.  
Then Tyrone opens his big stupid gob and yells, “Good thing your boyfriend and his fooking fudge-packing mate died cause now they'll burn in hell where they belong ya dumb cow!"   
"Shut up! Just shut the fook up!” And shite, I’m crying now. What the hell? Promised ourselves we wouldn't get fooking emotional, now didn't we? Came all this way down to see him, talk to me favourite bruvvah wot taught us to play football and stuck up for us at school and now he’s having a go at Jams like this! Jams who saved me life. Jams wot I left to die alone with a bunch of abusers and fooking foreigners. And that comment about Sy and me having kids from before. What THE FOOK was that? Honestly, I need to get pissed RIGHT NOW or I'm gonna explode.   
“City! This isn’t over!” he yells at me from the guard’s arms. For one second he shakes the guard off, still fit and ready to bust it up, even in here. “This isn’t bloody over!” And he makes to grab my bad hand, trying to get me where I’m weakest. But I remember how he used ta fight when we was kids, always dirty, and I’m too fast for ‘im now. I pull it back before he can touch me. And then the guard jumps on him, taser ready. I tuck the bad hand back in me pocket, protected for now.   
“They was worth the fooking lot of you brothers put together!” I yell at ‘im. “You buncha chavs ain’t worth shite compare to them! That fudge-packer saved me life! What’ve YOU done for me lately?”   
“Whatever, you freak. I’ll be out of here some day and back pulling and you’ll still have that fucking claw for a hand. That’s for the rest of your life, bitch, so suck on that!”  
“Fooking ragging on your little sister’s disability? Oh yeah, you’re well hard. Wotta a hard man you are! Impress all your mates with that, you fooking cunt. Hope yeh rot in here, save the lot of us the trouble,” I tell him and he shuts up, but shite I’m still crying. I've gotta stop crying. What’s wrong with me?  
I turn and leave the room, leave the arsehole to stew in his own fooking misery, as the rest of the guards flood in. ‘Bout time. Hope they batter some sense into 'im. It’s all he bloody well understands, just like me Dad says.  
I wait outside, feeling like shite. Why the hell’m I crying? And where’s the guard to take me out, eh? I’m bloody well suffocating in here. I need a smoke. Fooking clink putting people in boxes. Drive you batshite. If you wasn’t already fore you got the gig, you’ll sure be that way after a fortnight at Her Majesty’s pleasure, you best believe it.  
Finally, the bloody guard comes, giving me the evil eye like the row was my fault or someit. He swiped his ID card and we go through all these doors. Back on the street, I am well chuffed to be outta that shitbowl, jetting fast as I can to the off license. I got a six pack of Strongbows to chuck in my knapsack, even said “thank you” to the shopkeeper. Asian guy with big brown eyes like Sy, sad eyes, like he’d seen all them sorrows of the world. Then I got the funny idea that he was Sy for a second, grown old. How would Sy look now, if he survived? The cornershop guy was frowning now, me staring at him, gaze trailing down to the bad hand as I get me wallet out to pay in coins.   
Fook that, doing me head in, this.   
I got out quick to find a park drink me cider in peace. As soon as the sun goes down and it gets colder I’ll go to a proper pub, right now just want to be out in the sun. Not inside no more. Too much like fooking jail. I walked and walked and walked and drank and drank as I went. I don’t know how long. Just wanted to get far away from there get as far away as possible from that fucking shite bringing me down.   
I passed a few parks on the way, drank another cider and kept on going, no clue where I was. I didn’t care, just needed to walk all that aggro out of me ‘til I was clear headed again. It’s just Tyrone, stirring me up. Nuffink more. Finally, I get so my feet are knackered and the sun’s all gold in the trees, like it gets before it goes to sunset and it feels almost peaceful, almost beautiful, like that song "Waterloo Sunset" made into pictures. I once dated a guy in LA fancied himself a director, used to call this the Magic Hour. Wonder what happened to him. Fooker’s gotta have Facebook right? Only now, pissed as I am, can’t remember his name. All I know is he was the one I was with right before things with Sy got serious. Why it happened right then with me and Sy I can’t rightly tell, I mean we was in the band together for how many years before that without so much as a peck on the cheek, but there was always this sexual tension, understand. Only barrier was Ionee always came first with him, mother of his kid and that. Fooking Ionee. Always gotta win everything, her.  
I find a tree and sit down under the shade to watch the sun go down, grass lighting up all stained glass green in the late afternoon sun. Crack open my last Strongbow and listen to the sound of it fizzing in the can.  
Ah. Cider. The Magic Hour. Sitting on the green grass feeling wet and hazy remembering Vondelpark in Amsterdam, hanging out with the Fuck-Ups on tour, sitting in this park in the sunshine with a bunch of Dutch blokes smoking, eating space cake and drinking Amsterdam beer in actual fucking Amsterdam, feeling well chuffed, like we’d arrived or someit. I worked over there a while back. Not a bad place to be, working in a youth hostel, mostly British student trade. Left ipods in their beds sometimes and no one could finger you for stealing. Not much money in it, but I got my room and board free, all the spacecake I could eat and weed to smoke down the coffee shop on the premises, so all good in my book. Mellowed me out a bit. Two years back in Sheffield and I realize I’m not mellowed out at all. Even the grass makes me feel hepped up and paranoid these days. Only thing works to take the edge off is the booze. So that’s me sorted now, once again the least mellow cunt in Sheffield. But finally, after how many drinks, I’m finally down to that sweet mellow zone, worries all drowned out, slow, golden syrup time. Warm spring night, no need for soapy bubble, just letting it all slip slide away.   
Then over the slow syrupy air comes floating these weird low notes on a bass guitar. This intro running down the bass scale, then back and forth G and F, then G minor and F, G minor and F and I know a keyboard should come in there ‘round this point, don’t ask me how.   
Dum da dum da dum da da da da dum… Down your back, in your gut, deep bass gone down to the muscle at your core, right in your fook-bones. Music to vibrate the vagine. Sexy times, guaranteed.   
I could float a hand on it, like the notes are coloured puffs of smoke in the breeze. Yeah, I can almost taste the dry ice from the second-hand smoke machine that only worked half the time, wafting across the red spotlights we lugged along in the van to class the join up, Jams’ favourite test riff, this, “Princess of the Street” by the Stranglers.   
She’s gone and left me, I don’t know why…  
God it brings you back.   
Queen of the street what a special treat—There’s some kinda organ in it too, I think, that or a MOOG maybe. Bit like the Doors, that. Strange to have a punk band with an organ player.  
Then I shiver, as a hoarse voice floats over the bass line, can’t barely hear it over the sound of the guitar:   
She’s real good looking she makes you sigh,  
blue jeans and leather, her heels are hi-i-igh

The way he sings “high” voice cracking on the “i” like it was two sounds-- no one sang it that way but him, holding out that last note- but the voice was wrong, throaty and whispery, not like Jams at all—but so similar --I’m up on me feet—it couldn’t be nobody else—but how?  
Ionee said that time—over the phone-- said—what exactly? He died? That it? Or hurt? Could it be? Maybe just hurt? My brain is slow, I can’t recall, too much alcohol. What words exactly? Could be lies? Yes, yes, Ionee always lied! Why couldn’t I see it? Fucking rubbish, that, trying to manipulate me like always. I was getting pretty sure it had to be Jams now, but still, I couldn’t say his name.   
Vans trainers and legs in tight jeans poked out from behind the tree where the music was.   
What if I walked up and called his name and a total stranger stood up? Chav who just looks at me like I’m some slag, getting pissed in the afternoon?  
I get to my feet somehow and walk over to the tree. Around the edge I can just see the portable mini amp in the grass, cool and retro looking, the guitar hovering above it, the bass neck with the knobs and frets sticking out, player's square fingertips on the chords changing up, holding the neck gently the way you’d hold the chin of your lover, before you kissed him on the mouth. I knew those hands. Knew it was him all along.  
“Jams! Jams Deryan?”  
“Eh--?” rasped the voice that sounded all off, and then he was there with the bass in his hands and standing right in front of me before I could think what to say. I just stared at him me gob hanging open like a trout. He was thicker now, chubby bordering on fat. I always thought him well fit back in the day, him with that narrow waist, tan skin, and wild black hair like some kind of gay communist. Would've jumped them bones a'roight. Now here he was in this stupid green Adidas satin tracksuit jacket zipped up to the chin, the zip stretching tight across his belly. For a gay, I was starting to remember, he’d always had a rather crap sense of fashion. The things you forget about a person. God, all this time the fooking nutter was alive, not once he thought to drop us a line? What, too good for bloody Facebook or someit?  
“City! My God!” he said, wrecked voice like sandpaper. The eyes and smile though, classic Jams, still with the puffy hair standing straight up at the top, like some frightened cartoon character, if a little bit thinner now, with a gray streaks near the hairline and crinkles about his eyes. Not a ghost then, to be sure. Jams. Alive! No question!  
“City,” he put his hand on my shoulder. “It’s so good to see you! Where’d you come from? How’d you find us here?”   
I wasn’t listening, just laughing, relieved, insane, chuffed to bits that he wasn’t dead. “I can’t believe you’re—“ I almost said “alive” but replace it with “—back in London” last minute. “I thought you was all about doing the solo career thing in America still.”  
Then he says something I can’t quite hear, in that scratchy new Clint Eastwood voice.  
What?  
“That was a long time ago,” he said, a little louder. “Over that now. How ‘bout you? You gone back to Sheffield?”  
“Yeah, was out in the Dam for a bit, but been back a few years now working at this flash pub up north. Me bruv’s just down here working at the O2, so I reckoned I kip at his place a bit, have meself a little vacay.”   
“That’s nice. Been down there yet?”  
“Down where?”  
“The O2?”  
“Nah, not yet.”  
“You oughter go check out the British Music Experience. It’s expensive, but worth it at least once. You can play instruments and record yourself and they have all the real outfits worn by the Sweet!”   
Jams loved the Sweet, I now remembered, was completely obsessed with the song “Ballroom Blitz,” for two weeks straight, don’t ask me why. Played it ‘til it drove me mad in the van on our tour of Ireland over and over again trying to catch all the lyrics so he could write them down for some imaginary purpose in one of his high periods. Nutter.  
“You local?” I asked.   
“Yeah, me and Ionee--”  
“You and Ionee…” Suddenly, I ain’t feeling too good.  
“Yeah, we live together. Ocean, too. That’s them over there! Hey guys!”   
And before I even had a chance to find them in the large park and get my bearings he was calling out that hoarse voice of his, barely louder than speaking. “Ionee! Ocean!”   
They don’t hear him and I think I’m safe for the mo, but then “Come on,” he says and he’s hauling arse across the park, guitar over his shoulder, arm looped around my elbow, practic’ly dragging me, he’s that excited.   
I’m slowing my steps, but he don’t notice. I want to run, but I can’t without looking like an utter tit. It’s like I’m in some sort of dream, nightmare, my mind moving so slow like I’m stoned or something, my feet just keeping up walking beside him, when inside I’m going completely men’al.   
“When’s the last time you sawr Ocean?” says Jams, and it takes me a tick to catch what he’s on about, his voice so hoarse and me forgetting how Londony his accent was, and then I he’s pointing to this kid rocketing down the pitch, black ponytail flying out behind her.   
“I dunno, maybe she was one? Five?” Little kids look all alike to me, I couldn’t choose Sy’s daughter out of a line up, if I tried. All that really sticks in the memory banks is Ionee’s nonstop whinging about leaving our beer and fags on the coffee table where toddler Ocean could get at ‘em.   
Ocean’s got light brown skin like Sy’s, hair and eyes jet black like Sy’s, as well, but her features don’t look like his. More like a mini-Ionee dipped in caramel sauce or someit, shame.  
Ionee, in her infinite wisdom, has dressed their daughter in this ridiculous adult sized red and white Arsenal jersey on top with blue Tottenham Spurs shorts and knee socks on the bottom. Surely, this must be illegal in this part of North West London or at least a guarantee of a beat down in some afterhours pubs, assuming you aren’t a ten year old girl named after a fooking body of water, lucky for her. Now she’s dribbling the ball down the pitch, pretending like she’s a football commentator babbling along along nonstop as she goes. She’s not half bad for a kid, though if she ends up with tits like her mum, puberty’s going to be a bitch on her sport career.   
Speak of the devil, there she was, standing between two sticks, guarding the goal. Like Jams, she’d gone a tad chubbier than before and her hair was a different shade than when I saw her last, but really that was all. I’d recognize that cunt anywhere. Same smug-arse grin on that same smug-arse face. Ionee. Just thinking her name made my teeth gnash in me head.   
“C’mon Ocean! See if you can rush me!” she was yelling at Sy’s daughter, bossy voice cutting the air, annoying as ever.  
“Coming Mum!”   
Ocean kicks the ball along, deeking one way, then the other. Ionee feints right and feints left and then comes out of the goal and kicks the ball away from Ocean and now Ocean’s running breathless after Ionee, panting “Oi! Stoppit! Mum you’re outta orda—no fair!”  
I’m digging in me heels, but Jams’ hand is at my back bringing me in closer and I hear Ionee laughing over the green.  
“No fair, NO FAIR!” Ocean’s still shouting.  
I hear ya little sister.  
Ionee don’t notice us as we come near, too absorbed in the game. God, she fooking disgusts me. There she is, running around and playing football, having a fooking perfectly normal life like nothing ever happened, like it wasn’t her fault Sy was gone and me lost everything! Just getting on with her shit like I weren’t choking on me own fooking guilt all these years thinking Jams died and me not gone to see him! Didn’t even have the courtesy to bell me back t’say he made it outa the woods that time in New Orleans, like, maybe he weren’t even hurt to start with, maybe it was all some big scam, Ionee just toying with my mind, having a laugh! I wouldn’t put it past her, the cunt.   
If I was in that movie “Scanners” where cunts blow up each other’s heads just by thinking, her fooking melon would be well exploded, the amount of hate I’m directing her way. It’s like I stepped sideways into some alternate universe, where things somehow turned out all right, where people eventually got themselves sorted, got along with their fooking lives, crash be damned and did alright.   
I stared at her, Ionee at the goal, running and laughing and smiling with Ocean, like she forgot everything that happened, not even bovvering to notice me, like I wasn’t even worth her attention, and you’d never know looking at her that she was ever hurt at all! Bet she got herself some cute fit boyfriend, decent job, steady income, nice flat.   
Ocean’s got it right, shite ain’t fair.   
“Oi! Irons!” I shouted out at her.   
Then she looked up and saw me and I swear the world tilted sideways, the two of us locking eyes, just staring, gobs gaping as the ground went diagonal. Maybe it was just the drink, but no lie, it was just like that to me. Then the grass went straight again and Ocean made a grab for the ball, taking it out her mum’s hands, shooting it into the net while Ionee was distracted.  
“Goooooal! You lose, Mum, YOU LOOOOOSSSEE!” She pumped the air with two small brown fists and Ionee broke contact, still not saying a thing.   
I could see in the back her hair was still fluffy, turquoise-coloured these days, scraped back into a ponytail, puffing out into a cloud of blue-green cotton candy behind her head. A memory shot up through me out of nowhere; how Sy called her “Sheep” because of that wool and she would say “ba ba ba” and pretend to graze on his shoulder like it were grass. No protection from the memories now, coming thick and fast, painful, but pleasing like a drug.  
She’s wearing a T-shirt with some random 80s cartoon character on it, shorts and trainers, ridiculous striped knee socks. Up close now I see she’s not completely mint, one of her legs has that patched, skin grafty look to it that I well know. Ah, that’s good. At least she’s not completely free from souvenirs of our little jaunt down the canyon.   
Cold comfort, that. She got the last laugh in the end. Here she was, as well as ever running around in shorts. And Ionee would wear shorts, when she could just as easy do tracksuit bottoms, like she genuinely didn’t give a shite what the punters thought. Not self-conscious in the least, her. Like she was so fucking above them, Ionee, so perfectly confident and full of herself, like why would anyone in the whole wide world have anything to against her?   
Made me want to vomit, the whole thing. I would’ve killed for it to be like that for me—easy to hide what was wrong, people not asking you a million times a day. “Oi, what happened to your hand?” And if you say “fook off, leave me alone,” they all look so bloody offended. Ionee, she could hide what happened to her, but no, bitch’s got to flaunt it. Maybe she dug the attention, all them people looking, who knows, maybe she got off on it. Actually, it don’t seem too out of fucking character for her, now that I think about it.   
“City? I can’t believe it! What are you doing here?” she goes, all smiley smiley. And now she’s shaking her head like she really can’t believe it, like hasn’t been fooking plotting for this day forever, looking forward to some future where she could rub my nose in it, all her good fooking fortune that she don’t deserve.   
“Jesus! It’s been so long. It’s really good to see you,” she says, all gentle and stuff and I can feel myself starting to melt like butter, going all weak inside. I wonder if she’s going to try to hug me. I kind of want her to. She gave soft hugs, Ionee did, big and smooshy ‘cause of her boobs. Nobody hugs like that, not even blokes I sleep with. She used to say “we’re family, alla us in the band” and “I love you,” super casual, lying on the big bed with Sy between us, blowing smoke rings to the ceiling, like it weren’t nothing, like it don’t make you look weak, saying shite like that, “I love you?” Honestly! I mean, even Sy never said…but maybe she meant…in a sister kinda way…maybe?   
No! No! No! This is Ionee and she’s always got a trick up her sleeve, it’s all part of some scheme with her. Remember how she lied to you about Jams, what you went through! You’re not going down that road again! Look what friendship with that cunt cost you! You’re down half a hand, bitch! Now learn from your bloody mistakes already ye daft cunt!  
My heart is angry now and full of energy. There are these words on the wall in the ladies’ toilets, back in me local, at home in Sheffield: “Anger is a gift.”   
And the more I get to thinking about life, the more I see it’s true. Anger is a gift. It’s fuel and fire—stoking you up, getting you primed for action. Any justice ever in this fooked up world is only there ‘cause some poor cunt finally got fed up enough to decide to do something about it.   
I used to get angry all the time, took nothing to wind me. I’d get my blood up and go out, fight with me bruvers. I was a fooking fury on stage too, that anger like electric speed, coursing right through me, all roaring and thrashing at those fooking drums, busting me sticks up every night, just killing it.  
All that glorious anger, where’d it go? Now, I’m just empty, y’know? Depressed, shite upon by the outside world. Anger takes confidence to fucking stand up and fight, resist all the other cunts wot just want to mow you down.   
It’s like, you know that song by Pink Floyd? “Just Another Brick in the Wall?” Yeah the one where they go "If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding.” Choice bit, that. Used to love that song. Never gonna be another brick in the wall, not me, don’t need no education and all that, I used ta think. Now I fooking wish someone’d want me as part of their bloody wall. Fook all those old cunts bitching about conformity and “selling out,” oh boo hoo hoo. Them fookers had options, know what I’m saying? They could afford to fook up, reject shite. World was different then. Lucky them. Now it’s competition all the time with 9 billion other fooking people on the planet all scratching and clawing atchew trying to get what you want. You bugger up one job, you’ll not likely get another any time soon. They’ll replace you like that, maybe not even with another human being, either. Like that time I was working at ASDA, and they lay me off, okay fine, fair play, get pished on the job, but then I come back and they’ve got a bloody machine there going “Put your items in the bagging area, you will be exterminated blah blah blah!”   
“I’ll fooking bag you up robot!” I told it and jammed the coin slot and walked out the back with me Jammy Dodgers. Let’em pay some poor union sod to fix that.

But it don’t matter. At the end of the day we’re still kicking around town like some useless thing, part of nothing, just wishing that someone-- But nah, no one wants you, not as part of anything. Not even good enough to be a fooking faceless drone. Too broken, screwed up, don’t fit the image, blah blah blah. Just half-baked mud without enough firmness in the end to even make a brick.   
Fook not selling-out. You show me the line where I sign up. Because anything sure as shite beats what I am now.  
Or was. Because now, now I’m something different yet again. Because as soon I saw Ionee I was all like-- like there’s some of that old fire, cooking deep in me belly. A bit of that old hate-on I had for her, the slag. Her, oh, her I could fooking fight! I feel that fury flowing again over dead gray fields like molten lava, volcano anger, orange and red spurting through the cracks, busting up out of the depths, ripping through all that fossilized shit-encrusted apathy. That’s right Ionee, I was with you long enough to match your so-called pathetic attempts at “poetry” word for word when the mood fooking strikes me! And now the mood fooking strikes big time! This is a goal, this is. I did a goal-setting workshop once, when I was in some supporty support group in hand rehab, not the other one for drinking. Now what was that Paki doctor’s name, always bovvering me about setting “attainable goals” and other shite? Ah yeah, Dr. Kahn, roiiiighttt. I can imagine her listening to this, nodding that head of short gray hair with that encouraging crook-toothed smile. Oh she’d looooovvveee this, would Dr. Kahn.   
“So this is where I stand Doc, you see without Ionee in my life I wouldn’t be where I am today. Every wrong thing wot’s happened, wot’s fooked me over these years, it all comes from one place and that place is her. So here is my goal, because I got one now, Dr. Kahn. I’m going to destroy Ionee, I’m going to fooking NULLIFY her and then I’m going to get my life back at last!”

“Hey City,” says Ionee back in the real world, the one outside me bursting head and I nearly giggle, she’s so unaware she’s standing on a fucking eruption in the making. “Let’s go back to mine and have some drinks, yeahr?”   
Oh you bet, bitch.   
“We got a chippy downstairs, so I can do you some take-away if you’d like?”   
I think a million murderous thoughts, but all I say is:  
“Brilliant, sounds great.”


	20. Ionee: Old Friends

IONEE ISRALS  
(London, UK)

7.OLD FRIENDS

Of all the ways I thought this day would end when I woke up this morning, there’s no way I pictured it going down like this, me sharing drinks with City of all people!   
Not just cause she’s living up north these days, several hours away even by train, either. You have to understand, the last communication I got from her was in the hospital, a week after the crash. It wasn’t an e-mail or a phone call neither, just a scrawl of a letter, (most unfortunately for her, City was left handed and it was her left that was messed up in the crash), popped under the door of my hospital room one night and discovered by my Mum when she came to visit the next day. This is what it said:

“Dear Ionee, 

I am writing this so you know that I know that this is all your fault and you did it on purpose. If it wasn’t for you, you jealous bitch, Sy would still be alive and I’d still be on drums! You fucking ruined both our lives and I will hate you forever and ever until you drop dead, which I hope is SOON! Jams says you hurt your head and your leg is smashed to bits. Good! I hope they cut it off your leg I mean. You should keep your head so you get to experience lots more suffring from how hideous you look. I hope you can’t walk proper ever again. I have prayed to God, (the proper God, not your fucked up Jewy god) that your head wound causes you serious brian damage, even if Jams says it’s not likely at this stage. Whatever, maybe they’ll still take away your stupid daughter so you never see her again! You’re a fucking incompetent mother and you named your child after a cranberry drink so no wonder. I hope what you did hurts you forever, like you’ve hurt me and that Sy’s ghost haunts your dreams and never lets you sleep sound again! Never forget that this is all on you, all your fucking fault and if I see you again in the flesh I’ll fucking kill you! My brothers are also going to come and tare your eyeballs out you bitch so watch out! 

With love hate,  
Felicity Martingale   
PS. Also fuck you, you’re never calling me Manchester City ever again you fucking cunt! Sheffield FC forever!

 

Seriously, up ‘til then the worst letter I’d ever got was a chain letter in primary school. I have to say, on a completely objective level I was impressed she could spell incompetent. You’d never think it from the way she talked. (I always do the first “e” as an “a” by mistake).  
I didn’t react emotionally to it mind. My feelings felt odd and far away just like lots of other parts of me. Morphine’ll do that. I wondered which brother she’d send after me. This then segued into a fucked up dream involving a disturbing incestuous three-way of dubious consent between her three brothers. This made even less sense than her note since I’d clearly never fancied any of them even the least little bit.  
So now here we were seven years later, and me inviting City into Parklife to dine with me and mine. Why?   
I guess I thought I could forgive her. Don’t laugh!  
We all went through so much and I kind of understand where she was coming from with that letter. I was fucking furious back in the day, too. Every day I was just looking around in disbelief, like nothing was real, like it was some kind of in Bizarro World version of my life, a nightmare. I mean what the hell? Sy dying, it was just so, so, so WRONG. I imagined all the different ways our future could go and this wasn’t in the cards—not any of them! He was in his TWENTIES. He wasn’t ill at all, not even feeling poorly. Healthy, laughing-- okay, yeah, acting like a total dick, to be honest, but all the same, so very very alive and then bam, nothing. Only, it was everything, him dying like that.   
And I still don’t know really what happened.   
City made out like I was some jealous scheming bitch all: “If I can’t have him, no one can, bwa ha ha ha!” Which, like seriously? Does that even sound like me? (Except for the “bwa ha ha ha” bit, cause I added that). What the hell? You know me at all, you know I couldn’t plan my way out of a paper bag. Just the thought of what?— intentionally trying to kill us all in the car—what sort of fucked up brain would even think of that? I mean it’s ridiculous, right?   
Still, I kind of get it, her laying that on me. You get in some weird headspaces when serious shit happens to you, like you’re trying to make sense of something your brain’s just not equipped to handle, that doesn’t jibe with the predictable world you’ve known all your life. Apparently, we all walk around with some kind of mock-up of the world in our heads. It’s this orderly, somewhat predictable, cause and effect, thing, like a well-balanced neo-Romanesque building. Then something crazy happens and it’s this spikey Deconstructivist alien spaceship crash landing right into it fucking with the blueprints-- picture the Royal Ontario Museum if you will— and it’s not easy getting your mind un-fucked after something like that.  
I remember the rehab place, all those old people just stewing away, the only thing standing between me and bitch slapping the worst offenders, the sheer difficulty of just standing, not to mention having to use a walker just to get about. Those loud fog horn voices moaning in the night, waking me from half-drugged sleep, my one moment of painless peace, only place to forget the horror that was now my life, interrupted! Because of why? Because of nothing! Just some fatuous old fucker blathering on about wetbacks on TV coming to take away good American jobs. No asshole, old retired twats like you, still sucking that social security teat even though you’re still pulling down like 300 Gs a year on investments, charging rent to people like me for properties you bought for a song back in the dark ages, YOU’RE the ones bankrupting the system. Greatest generation my ass. Most racist generation more like! Old fuckers wot lost the plot ages ago, telling off these poor Filipino care workers, voting Republican, polluting the world with all their sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, fake-religious bullshit, telling the rest of us how to live based on ideology was outdated when my parents were teenagers-- While Sy, poor sweet, talented Sy-- cold in the ground at 29 years old.   
Look, maybe that’s an unfair estimation, but true or not, those old fuckers were doing my nut in. Just weeks ago I’d been down the studio in Burbank Sy, Jams, City and me working on the album… from that to a glorified nursing home surrounded by senile Lawrence Welk-watching twats not three weeks later! Gives you pause, don’t it?   
I don’t belong here, I’m not like them, I’m going to get out of here and be free, that’s what I kept thinking and it was the only thing I could do to keep me sane and trying to get better.   
Just goes to show you can get so low inside about your circumstances, you can get to hating on people for just being alive. With Sy dead I reckon I was jealous of the life other people had, of the unequal distribution of fucking life on this planet, all the living wasted on these old fuckers whinging about nurses slipping pills in their pudding. I tried telling ‘em, it’s not the pudding they put the sedatives in, they just give’em to you straight with the rest of your meds before bed, mate, you’re just too far gone to notice! And then I felt even worse -- it really wasn’t their fault, poor sods, even more miserable than me.   
I thought of Venice Beach, strolling with Ocean and Sy— No, not Sy anymore, I had to remind myself-- No, strolling with my parents, Ocean, Cammy, Shoshi and Jams by the water, all the crazies and weirdos out on the boardwalk at midday—that roller blading guitar guy with the turban and bullseye painted guitar, hippies selling toy animals made of cans and bottle caps and twisted license plates, the dreadlocked guy with the poetry books and driftwood paintings of Bob Marley, the fortune teller with the magic scented candles— I missed them all. The sunlight turned on full power made it feel a little different, but Venice always made me feel not-too-far-from my familiar patch in Camden market. Even in those days, before the shop, Camden was our home, in spirit anaway, (though the likes of us couldn’t afford to live there, even back in the day).  
At least I knew I was getting out, whether I ever really walked properly or not. I had a family to get back to who loved me, not that I deserved even a sliver of that inexplicable bottomless love, not after everything I done, but they didn’t seem to care. Sometimes their capcity to forgive frightened me.   
In hospital I daydreamed constantly of being back with Ocean, Mum and Dad and my sisters, sitting on my parents’ back patio, Dad doing up a barbeque, Beach Boys music on the radio. They were all I really wanted. My home wasn’t a city, or a nation or a religion—they were, just that little handful of people, my only religion. But who did those old folks have to believe in them like that? Who did City? That lot of drunks up north? What home’d she have? A room her mum sublet for extra money before she even moved out proper? Who the fuck’d do that to their own kid?  
Just what I’m saying is, just thinking these things, it don’t make you evil. Even writing it in a letter to someone, like City did to me—I get wanting to release the venom before it poisons you inside and you do something really bad. Seriously, I do. I mean we all think shit, talk shit-- it’s what we do matters, right? I imagine City after the accident now, looking for someone to blame, someone to pin that anger on-- Because if it’s no one’s fault, just chance and circumstance, then where’s all that anger go? Right back on yourself.— In retrospect I got where she was coming from.   
Okay though, I’d some help figuring it all out. They had lots of occupational therapists at the rehab, although what occupation some of my fellow patients were going back to—yelling at juvenile ASBOs for tipping over garden gnomes and complaining to their local paper?-- I still’ve no clue. Most the therapists were for physical stuff, but there were one or two there for mental health. We all got to see a counsellor to “help with our adjustment process.” I had some memory issues what with the head injury, so there was that, as well.  
My counselor—“Call me Jan like ‘Jan and Dean,’”-- though who they were, this random 1960s surf rock duo I learned later, I had no idea— She was this 60-something mature surfer chick, blonde-gray streaked hair, all fried out and bleached from too much sea and sun, skin weathered to leather from all that time outdoors before people wore sun cream. Even her office smelled of seaside, courtesy of a fragrance mist from Bath and Bodyworks, but still--all decorated in these folksy collages—seaglass and starfish with a coffee table of “distressed” wood, to match all the distressed people rolling through there. There was a signed print on the wall, the poster for that surf movie—“The Endless Summer.” Don’t I know it.  
I dug that room, despite the shitty nature of some of the stuff we talked about there. It was the one space in the building didn’t scream “geriatric hospital.” You weren’t supposed to prefer one patient to another, but I think she liked me. I don’t recall too much of what we talked about, but one thing she said stuck with me-- talking about City-- about people who have no control over things in their life, who just pick the closest person around to blame a focus for all that anger and frustration. At least when you’re lashing out at someone else you’re doing something, fighting back in some way, not just sitting there helpless letting it all just happen to you.  
I’m different, for me, all that anger just turns inward in a mental effort to tear myself a new one, though that’s not how Jan would phrase it. Far less healthy for yourself, though easier on those around you.   
Part of going to Jan was seeing there were other options, other than just feeling shitty for the rest of my life. There was this whole metaphor she explained to me about a stormy ocean. You think the storm that’s your emotions is you, but it’s just transient states of weather no matter how they whip the waves one way or the other. The important thing to remember is that you’re the ocean and as uncomfortable as it is, no change of weather can destroy you, you remain no matter what the weather does. The ocean doesn’t try to stop the storm, just lets it pass on through, moving along with every other kind of weather. Or it’s like you’re a surfer, and life events and emotions are the waves. The key is not to let it throw you, to keep your mental balance and keep on riding.   
I don’t know, I think I’m maybe not zen enough to think that way unless I really step back and concentrate. It’s too easy to get wrapped up in everything, the whole flow of life around you. I mean on one hand everyone’s all; “trust your gut” and on the other it’s all like, “emotions are just weather” so what do you go by? And if your emotions aren’t you, just storms in your brain passing through, then what makes you you?  
Questions for other people, those. Me, I just wanted to get back home to my Ocean. My loved ones and my music, that’s what I need, forget the rest.   
It’s not really about forgiveness, I just can’t hate someone if I’ve ever loved them. It’s like there’re pieces of my soul lodged in everybody I’ve ever cared about, moments I only ever shared with them. Who I am is bound up in so many other people. City—there are experiences we had together, memories of Sy and each other-- she may be a cunt, but she’s still one of only a handful of people in the whole world who was there, who knew what is was to be in the Fuck-Ups, who saw what I saw and felt what I felt. Messed up as it is, I know deep in the seat of my soul that City, and only City among all the billions of people on this planet knew Sy the way I did. Knew what it was to make love to him, to love him and be loved by him. And I guess she’s the only one who can truly understand what it’s really like to lose him, because she lost him, too.   
And Sy aside, Sy completely aside, City was my friend. One of my closest friends for years and years and a fucking laugh. Each person I’m with—we all have a slightly different chemistry with one another and back in the day there was no one I could make laugh like her. No one so crazy, no one so ready to be extreme and out there, no one who could provoke me the way she could, who could challenge me up on stage to be a better musician.   
The me I was with City, that fun-loving, crazy, hell-raising, balls to the walls, up for anything, me-- was a me I missed. Living in the mum zone you have to tamp that part of your personality down. But it’s a bloody shame to lose something so fun. With City it didn’t really matter if I thought she was a good person. She didn’t have to be a mensch, she was my partner in crime and that was enough.   
What mattered—what really mattered-- was City kept a part of my soul, even now, no matter what I did to make a new life for me and Ocean and Jams outside the Fuck-Ups. It would never be enough. It could never electrify my senses the same as performing with the Fuck-Ups could. I missed the backstage stuff too, seeing new sights, new people alla the time, that intense experience of what it was like to be a Fuck-Up. One soul made of four people, expressing one thought, together on the stage. And now there were only 3 of us left in the whole wide world.  
God, I wanted it back so bad, being up there and adored. Making music in real time in front of real people; sweating and drinking and pogoing up and down, instead of in the studio, playing back-up for someone with songs that got as much to say to the world as a wet flannel.   
I wanted to see City again. Shit, just out of curiousity, I needed to see her again. Maybe if I didn’t take this opportunity, and try to bridge the gap between us, if I didn’t reach out and grab her back in, she’d just disappear down the bottle.   
Look, maybe I’m just stuck in a rut, still reliving the glory days. I mean, I run a punk shop in 2014. How anachronistic is that? Our band had a ridiculous name, and was never really famous. I know that. So why can’t I just let go already? Why’m I still hanging on? Why don’t I tell City to scarper? People can’t change that much. Someone like that, they don’t really deserve a second chance.   
But where would I be if my Mum and Dad didn’t give me a second chance to get my shit together, not to mention a third, a fourth and even more? Not that I deserved it. They never gave up on me, even when I gave up on myself. Even when I thought no future I could ever have now would be as good as the past, so what was the point of moving forward, what was there to look forward to? Even then, they somehow made me believe I could be happy again, that things could feel worthwhile again, but sometimes when I think back…  
Jams tells me it’s just hindsight making things in the past seem better than they really were, that keeps me looking back. Those days in the band—were they all that great, really?   
Well actually, yeah, they were.  
Even if we never sold a lot of records or made serious money, it was the best kind of life, making art every day, art you believed in, hanging with your four best mates, competing with each other in the studio, riling people up in concert, making something brand new, this absolutely mad music straight from our souls, speaking truth to power—don’t laugh now— but sometimes I felt—I felt like we could change the world, even if it was just our own little part of it. Make our mark, leave something behind for the next generation. Being part of something like that—how could any “normal” job like being an estate agent or a bank manager hold a candle?   
Nowadays, you might see me in my shop and maybe I’m working the till or I’m at home in Parklife helping Ocean with maths homework, and it all looks completely normal and boring from the outside, just like anybody else, but with part of my mind I’m playing my guitar on that stage at some tent far off from the mainstage at Glastonbury, remembering again, slogging it out in the muck barely half a metre off the ground three hours after a rainstorm turned the turf into a mud bath, hair falling in my eyes, muck splattering over my guitar from some beachball the crowd was hurling around, and me in perfect bliss-- too consumed with playing to care that we were all caked with dirt up to our knees—looking over at Sy, those shining eyes like brown chocolate winking in the sun and sunset tracing the contours of his sweaty bare chest in a rim light of gold-- the most desirable, fuckable fit thing in the whole universe and he was looking at me like I was the same--—his jeans hanging low off those narrow hips like I could’ve peeled them right off with my teeth and sexed him up right then and there.  
I mean, how do you touch a high like that? Not with weekly shops at Sainbursy’s or monthly rental payments, surely. Getting all stoked up about healthy, low calorie cooking’s kind of weak tea after that. Suffice to say I let myself go a bit.   
Now the really freaky thing about City was actually not the hand thing at all, but the fact that she looked exactly the same as she did back in the Fuck Ups days. Seriously, not a day older than the woman on the cover of “the Fuck-Ups in the Lock Up,” like everything except her hand’s been frozen in time. Seeing her, hearing her, looking and sounding exactly the same-- it brought it all flooding back. A kind of miracle all these things I was suddenly remembering-- it was all stored locked up in my mind, I was thinking, all I needed were the right keys-- now if only she could give me back the key to that one memory I really needed, if I just spent a little more time with her…   
And all the time, I was carrying on this completely banal conversation with Ocean about how me and City knew each other, skimming over just the top of the iceberg, with the rest of this massive thing from a thousand fathoms, this fucking BEAST we call our relationship, slithering round like a Kraken underwater.   
“Who’s she when she’s at home then?” Ocean asked, screwing up her nose in that cute way she did that always made me smile. We walked behind Jams and City down the street to Parklife as the two of them chatted in front of us.  
“Oh, you know City, she’s our old bandmate, from the Fuck-Ups days, used to do the drumming.”   
“REALLY?” Her eyes went wide as saucers. “I didn’t know. You certain? You ain’t tol’ me!”  
“Yes I did.”  
“Really? When? Wait—then she knew Dad— Didn’t she? Didn’t she know ‘im?”  
“Yeahr, she knew ‘im.”   
Oh sweet little Ocean how little do you know how much one “yeah” can encompass. Yes, she certainly did in every sense of the word, biblical included. “But maybe you don’t want to ask her too many questions about him, baby. I don’t think she likes to talk about it,” I answered smoothly.   
I couldn’t have Ocean getting City wound up. Everything had to stay calm, I had to stay with her long enough to get the key, to remember what happened at last.  
“What happened to her hand?” Ocean said in a cringe-inducing “whisper,” you could’ve heard up in the cheap seats. Luckily, City didn’t turn around.   
“Car accident,” I answered softly, “you know, like what you happened to your dad and me and—“  
“The same one or a diff--?”  
“The same.”  
“REALLY? But how-- You said it was you and Dad and Jams,” she counted on her fingers, three people, “you didn’t say she were in the car with--“  
“City—her name is Ci--”  
“—you as well,” she frowned, all judgment and disapproval. “You LIED to me!”   
“Oh come on Ocean grow up, you never asked me. How could--   
“Only ‘cause you didn’t tell me! And I’m a kid, innit? What’re you saying grow up? That’s a load of bollocks.” she said and kicked her football on ahead of us without looking. “Why’s everyone always know everyfing ‘cept me,” she grumbled and I cringed as the football rolled sideways off the kerb and into the street.  
“Hell, Ocean watch what you’re doing!”   
“Sorry Mum! I’ll get it!”  
“No you bloody well don’t missy, you stay right here!” Fuck it, I could hear my Mum on that one. But that was all I need now, Ocean running in the street where any passing motor could take a swipe at her. I was already a bundle of nerves with City around and me just crossing in front of two cars outside a zebra crossing. I looked both ways twice to check it was clear and ran across. I’m usually never careless about shit like this, but loping back I felt something twinge in my ankle as I stepped in a bit of a hole by the gutter. Got to be careful not to overdo it. When I feel good I sometimes forget to take it slow. At last I made the kerb and gave Ocean the football.   
“Just hold it, alright?”   
“Oh-KAY! Fine!” she said crossly as she took it from my hands, but her eyes didn’t look angry, just scared. She doesn’t like people talking about car accidents or running across streets. I’m kind of relieved at how tightly she usually grips my hand at zebra crossings, even if a part of me feels a bit guilty-- a kid shouldn’t have to worry about shit like that. I mean how’s she ever going to learn to drive? She’ll just have to live in London forever, I guess. Not the worst fate, that. If it were up to me, I’d never live anywhere else and Cammy feels the same, even if she complains her bogeys’ve turned gray since she moved here.   
Back at Parklife Ocean mellowed a bit, too excited about showing all her treasures off, rabbiting on to City about Pokemon cards and My Little Ponies. Jams hung back, suddenly subdued. It was that time of day when the sedation effect from his meds kicks in and he usually nods off in front of the telly. I could see him desperately trying to keep his eyes open so not to offend-- not that he worries about offending me much, even falling asleep sometimes when we’re having actual conversations. I don’t get my back up about it like some people do, but it’s murder on getting any sort of proper employment, falling asleep all over the shop. Despite it all Jams says the Quetipine is light years better than any of the other stuff he’s tried when it comes to side effects. At least this way he can lead a halfway normal life, even if he only really has this two or three hour window between the time when the sedation wears off and when the mood boosting effect is at its strongest that he thrives in. That’s the time when he’s at his sharpest mentally, his best mood and energy wise, too. Sometimes he says it blows knowing he’ll go back to being all stupid and sedated when he wakes up in the morning and he never has enough time when he’s sharp to do all the things he wants to do.   
But, as Dad would say, them’s the breaks. Everybody’s got some crap thing to deal with in life. Our motto is: “Never mind the bollocks, let’s just get on with the shit we got to do.”   
As the meerkats on the telly say; Simples.   
But you know what wasn’t simples? Double guessing myself trying to reckon how this night would go down. Disaster or tender reunion? With City it could go either way. I needed Jams at my back, the neutral party to fix this tension.  
Unfortunately, with him on his way out of the conversational picture, that just left the rest of us standing around the kitchen gawrping awkwardly at each other, trying not to ask what we were dying to know. Maybe I could delay him from taking his second tablet and prevent him from his nightly kip in front of the telly?  
Not knowing what to say to City, I went with what I knew: “Care for a drink?” I turned to investigate the back of the fridge and discovered we only had a can of Heenikien, which is not me misspelling anything but actually this knockoff Chinese beer that probably contained foetus parts we found in the fridge when we first moved in and haven’t touched since. But this is City we’re talking about, so I reckoned she wouldn’t kick up a fuss.   
“No worries, luv, brought me own,” she said waving me off, taking this can of Strongbow out of her rucksack. “Fancy some?”   
“Ta.” I grabbed and gulped, still nervous. Unlikely she had access to Polonium 210 like those Russian poisoning guys, I told myself, and anything’s got to beat foetus beer, right?   
“Jams?” She offered him one.  
“Okay.”  
Actually it really isn’t okay. I know what alcohol does to him when he’s on his meds. He’ll be out like a light after only a few sips the sturpid blighter, but all he does is rub some lint off the tab and drink. Brilliant, just fucking brilliant! Now it’s certain to be me and City mano a mano. Or womano a womano, I guess. But this wasn’t the old days, I had Ocean open on the convo front now. Good little chatterbox Ocean who hadn’t stopped holding forth with the Dr. Who stuff since City arrived.   
“Come see my room!”   
“Alri--”  
“It’s brilliant! Jams and me painted a TARDIS on the door like in Dr. Who! You have to see! Then when I go into my room I’m in this SPACE TRAVEL MACHINE! And it transports you through space! And time as well! And when I have dreams it’s like I really go to other planets and times and spaces and after school we play I’m the Doctor and sometimes Jams is my companion, innit Jams?”  
“Uh-huh,” said Jams, sipping the Strongbow, his eyes half closed in that just-had-a-satisfying-wank-and-shot-my-load look I knew from the many times he took a shower before me and wasted all the proper hot water. I guess I couldn’t blame him for fancying a pint, but to leave me alone with someone who once vowed to kill me—yes, she was in critical condition in the A and E and probably pumped full of morphine at the time, but STILL—not cool Jams, not cool. He was already getting wobbly on his feet. That early in I wondered if it was even chemically possible, Shoshi would know, she did neurology in pre-med, but buggered if I do.   
“I have a guitar in the closet! A real one! I’m going to be a pop star when I grow up!” Ocean chattered on. I looked behind me for just a tic, just to see if Jams was already asleep when, like a slow motion train wreck, I saw Ocean try to grab City by her injured hand to pull her towards the closet. It was the natural instinct, as she was holding the drink in her other hand. City glanced at Ocean as Ocean’s small hand reached out and I saw the emotions flash microsecond quick across her features-- fear, disgust, anger-- she drew back, like Ocean’s touch would burn her. Maybe it would? How could I know what condition her hand was in? Ocean stepped back, frightened for a seoncd, not quite certain what City would do.   
One thought occupied my mind above all else; Protect Ocean! “Sweetheart be careful with—“  
But City just laughed. “Lord, Irons you oughter see your face! C’mon Ocean!” She put her can of cider down on the column radiator and lazily grabbed Ocean by the elbow with her goo dhand. “Let me check out your axe.”   
You’re fucking ridiculous, Irons, is what she must’ve been thinking.   
And she was right.   
City was different than I remembered her, the way she behaved, like generous y’know, complimenting Ocean on her guitar choice, speaking gently with her, cutting back on the various S and C words. Had she ever been like that when I knew her? She used to play guitar, too, I remembered just then. Was she still cross with me over that loss, as well? Could you ever forgive someone for doing that to you? Really leave the past in the past?  
“I wrote twenty-four songs already” announced Ocean proudly. “I recorded them with Mum on the computer with this Odd City program.”  
“Audacity,” I corrected her.  
“Roight, that’s what I said Mum! They’re brilliant, Jasmine at school says! I can play the keyboard, too! Jams, he gives me lessons, y’know? But he really plays the bass, him. Were you truly in a band together for real? Mum says you was. Hey, do you want to know something?”  
“Wot?” asked City and I got that sinking feeling in my stomach as I wondered if Ocean was going to ask something about Sy. “Ocean, I’m sure City—“   
I tried to stop her before she mentioned her dad and things really went south. But all she said was, “Last month I got a new duvet! See? It has guitars on it! So now it’s a rock star bed! Do you want to meet my cuddly toys?” Ocean pointed to her collection of stuffed octopi. “These are the Spiders from Mars! They’re named after those guys that played with David Bowie!” Although there were technically three members of David Bowie’s 1970s backing band the Spiders from Mars, Ocean has seven cuddly octopus toys. I don’t know how the octopus/spider confusion started with her, my guess is it’s the eight legs thing, combined with a space themed laser show we saw on the Thames outside the London Aquarium, where the first of the “Spiders” was adopted from the gift shop.   
Next she introduced City to her art gallery, drawings dating back to her Reception days, selotaped to the wall.   
“This is one is Ziggy Stardust,” she pointed to a picture of David Bowie I’d not yet seen. He had a pink lightning bolt traveling out the side of his head and aggressively silver trousers. “I used this entire silver Sharpie just on his trousers!”   
“I believe it,” said City with a twist of a smile and I couldn’t help smiling as well, as Ocean pointed directly to David Bowie’s vividly silver package.  
“He’s on another planet here, which is why the grass is rainbow coloured.”  
“What’s this one of?” asked City, pointing to a drawing above the bed, curling and yellow around the edges.  
“Oh, this is an old one. It’s my own football advert. See? Spurs face off with Arsenals!”  
City scrutinized the picture. “What the--?” Four football players, two in Spurs and two in Arsenal jerseys, one boy and one girl on each team were hugging each other below a sky filled with rainbow clouds and love hearts and this is what their speech balloons said:

Spurs Girl: Girls play on r team because girls R best!  
Spurs Boy: That is rite. Girls are faster, also smarter. Yay girls!  
Arsenal Boy: Lets all be frends! Fiteing is bad. We will win the werld cup 2gether!  
Arsenal Girl: Peace out bruvr! 1 LUV! Friends 4evah!!!!!!!!

City began to smirk, holding her drink in front of her mouth like that would hide her laughter. “All my days, that is without a doubt the GAYEST thing I’ve ever seen!”  
“Oi, that’s rude,” Ocean frowned. “Head Teacha says we’re not to use that word that way. Anyways, Uncle Jams is a gay and that’s okay and Mum likes my poster. Don’t you Mum?”  
Unfortunately, City’s laugh was catching. “Arsenals and Spurs friends 4evah!” I giggled.  
“With love hearts! Now there is something you won’t find at Arsenal Station!”  
“No, I don’t think you can,” said Ocean seriously. “But I’ll make you one if you’d like.”   
“Okay, but not for Spurs or Arsenal. Do you know how to draw the Sheffield jersey?”  
“I can look it up on the internet.” Ocean pointed to her laptop in the corner, my old one really.   
“Fab, tell you what, if it’s proper professional I’ll even give you a quid for it.”  
Ocean squeezed one of the Spiders from Mars nearly to stuffy bits with excitement. “Really?”  
“Uh-huh.”  
“Brilliant! You’re brilliant!”  
“I know,” said City with a smug smile in my direction, that kinda got my back up. I always did dislike that moment in Empire Strikes Back…  
I ordered up some fish and chips from downstairs. We’d all had supper, but I reckoned City’d be peckish after the long walk from the Scrubs. When I came back up she was watching this stupid wedding reality show on telly with Jams who was already snoring away.  
“You believe some cunts actually wait their whole fooking life to do that?” she gestured at the TV. “Lookit this poor cow, getting tarted up like a giant white fat merangue! Load of bollocks you ask me. See, I’d say fook tradition and wear black, I were big as that fatty roight there.”  
“Now there’s that enlightened attitude to female body image I remember.”  
“Ha! I’ve fooking missed you! You still smoke?”  
“Only soc—“  
“Socially, yeah, yeah,” she finished for me. “Same as always, bumming a fag”  
She gave me a cigarette I cracked a smile at the memory.  
“Wot?”   
“Remember, in America when we were recording at that studio in San Fernando Valley and we didn’t know they were filming that gay porno next door--”  
“Heh heh—“  
“And we saw the PAs smoking and you said—“  
“Mind if I bum a fag or two? Its’ not for me really, just me friend Jams over there likes ‘em, but he’s too shy to ask.”  
“All my days, I almost died laughing!”   
“Your fault really, how’s I to know it don’t mean the same thing in America?”  
“Oh come’on admit it! You knew! You just wanted to fuck with them.”  
“Uh yeah, course I did, you see the knobs on those blokes?”  
“Ech, don’t get me started. Fuckers would’ve split you in two.”  
“Still don’t see why they made such a palaver. Fooking prudes, them Americans, e’en the porno ones.”  
“Had some good hash though didn’t they?”  
“Mmm-hmmm, speaking of, Jams still got a bit o’ green lying around?”  
“Yeah, gets it on prescription from the chemist’s now, I think.”  
“Good bud?”  
“Suppose so.” I looked over at Jams. He doesn’t really care if I take a joints now and again and it’s been AGES. “I gotter balcony.” A lie that, it’s really just a rusty outdoor fire escape/stairwell sort of thing, but it serves it’s purpose as occasional smoking venue when Ocean’s sleeping. “Why don’t you get started, yeah? I’m just going to make sure Ocean goes to bed before I join you.”   
Twenty minutes later City and me were outside smoking together for the first time in ten years and I’m not going to lie either, it felt fucking brilliant!  
“So? How’s life treating you?” she asked the sort of question you ask when you don’t know what to say. I watched her lean against the railing, arching her back, sleek as a cat as she blew a perfect ring. I don’t smoke enough to perfect that kind of style.   
She dressed nicely, if mildly slaggish, but you can wear stuff like that and still look good when you’re thin as a rake and don’t have much of a rack.   
“A’right I guess.”  
“Nice place to live you got here anyway.”  
“Sure, if you don’t mind all your clothes smelling like a fry-up.”   
“Beats living with your Mum. Living with her, AND she’s still charging me rent. Bloody cheek, innit? Can’t even bring a guy home for a proper shag with that cunt around. Anyway, good to see you land on your feet. And you still kept both of ‘em. Well done!” She lifted her fag like a wine glass in toast.   
“You don’t know the lot. You oughter see the scars.”  
“I can see ‘em from here,” she said, looking down at the area of exposed shin between bottom of my shorts and the tops of my socks.  
“Pfft, that’s the least of it.” I pushed off my right trainer with with my other foot, rolled off the sock and stretched my foot up on top of the railing, ankle parallel to her face. The biggest scar goes right around my ankle, wide as my thumb below the skin graft. “Here, have a butcher’s.”  
“Eew! Butcher’s is roight!”  
I took my foot off the railing and put the sock back on. “Least it saves me time shaving.” On account of the skin graft not growing hair, that, not that I’d need to spell that out for her.   
“Thought you used Nair?”  
“That was Jams.”  
“Still, bet you can’t do this.” I watched her place the fag between the two fingers of her bad hand. They were shorter than normal fingers, missing a joint, with very pink skin and no nails, next to a little nub of a thumb. She used her other hand to squeeze them together around the fag, then she let go and the fag remained between them.   
I gave her the slow clap, not sure if it was the right thing to do. Were we sufficiently made up with each other to bring back the sarcasm without offense? “What am I supposed to be looking at?”  
“Ah, ah, patience, my child, wait for it--”  
I waited, but nothing happened. Maybe I was just supposed to be impressed she could hold anything with her fingers like that. Fuck that was too sad to think about. “So anyways, what brings you to our neck of the woods?”   
I was expecting her to mention something about being in want of money, it was her usual thing back in the band days, trying to hit me up whenever she got a chance because apparently my parents were posh. Whatever. She should see my fucking credit card debt. But instead she surprised me.   
“Tyrone. He’s in the Scrubs.”  
“Tyrone?”  
“Me bruvver, remember?”  
Uh-huh, yeah I remembered her brothers, though I’d be buggered if I could tell you which one was Tyrone, which was Maxwell, which was Fraser or was his name Kenneth? They seemed all of a lot to me—big sunburnt fuckers working in the building trade or as bouncers for dodgy dance clubs, nicking stuff to sell at market when they couldn’t land any of either.   
Each of ‘em had loads of tattoos all endorsing Sheffield United F.C. Apparently nobody’d chosen to inform these three hapless cunts that the whole Football Firm thing went out with the 90s. It was a game for young men anyway, but there they were, upwards of forty and still getting pissed and picking fights at the football.   
Can’t say I was surprised one of them’d ended up in the clink, only that they’d always seemed to me too much of a unit for one to get done all on his lonesome, without the rest of the gormless pack going down with him.  
“Bad luck’s all it is,” she continued. “Just got in a fight at a bar and the other guy hits his head the wrong way and the rubbish docs in the hospital call it fooking brain damage. Fucking random crap is wot it is. Tyrone, poor lad’s going fooking mental in the stir, not talking sense. Fooking depression, is wot it is.”  
I doubted Tyrone was actually suffering from depression, me. To get depressed, one requires an actual brain to get depressed with and the only thing between that cunt’s ears was a football. City sighed and sagged against the wall, cigarette still held in the two stiff fingers of her mangled hand and I genuinely felt sad for her now. Though I’m sure he more’n deserved whatever sentence he got, it’s a shit thing to happen to anyone.   
Prison scares me. Not that I’ve ever done anything they could realistically do me for, unless the car crash was all part of some diabolical master plan on my part, but if I can’t find any proof of that, unlikely anyone else would. Still, just the idea of it, trapped in a place you hated, somewhere you weren’t allowed to leave, just struck me as particularly horrible, shades of the hospital running through my mind. Worse still, to be like Sy’s mother or my grandma back in Toronto, stuck in a failing body that couldn’t do what you wished, a dying brain unable to think properly or communicate anymore. And totally blameless of any crime to boot. Fucking unfair, that. That scared me the most, more than prison, even just the little taste of that I’d had, seeing those old folks at the rehab and those months in a wheelchair, when I couldn’t go where I wanted, when I wanted to, people muttering terrifying things like “mild traumatic brain injury” (even with the word “mild” before it, not a phrase you ever want to hear applied to yourself), and the doctor’s noncommittal and words “wait and see,” scaring me half to death about my future.   
“Was the other bloke okay eventually?”  
“Eh?”  
“The brain damaged guy? Did he get better?”  
“Who knows? Does it matter?”  
“Probably does to him,” I said, trying to make it a bit of a joke, trying not to dwell on the fact that she didn’t care.   
“How about you? You get all your marbles back in the end?”   
“Mostly I guess, plus this souvenir.” I pointed to the line through my eyebrow where they sewed me up.   
“They did a good job. You wouldn’t notice, you weren’t looking for it.”   
“Uh-huh. You ever get deja fu?”  
“Wot?”  
“It’s this thing me and Jams noticed, like when you’re living your normal life and suddenly, you get this feeling of déjà vu like you’ve been here before, but then you realize it’s not that—it’s really you saw a similar situation in a film and you’re just remembering that.”   
“So what film is this then?  
“I’m trying to figure it out… something on a boat—oh! There it is! Jaws!”  
“Us smoking on your balcony reminds you of a film about a shark?”  
“Not the shark part, but that part where they’re below deck drinking and showing each other their battle scars and then they start singing. Remember? Show me the way to go home! I’m tired and I wanna go to bed!”  
“That’s a rubbish American accent.”  
“It’s not supposed to be American! It’s Robert Shaw.”   
“Who the fook’s Robert Shaw?”  
“Captain Quint!”  
“Wot?”  
“C’mon any second now the shark’s going to ram our boat!” I began to shake the balcony like Jaws was ramming our boat. “Aaaaaah!”  
“You’re bonkers, y’know?” She gave a weedy giggled.  
“No, you’re bonkers! Help help the shark’s coming! Da na da na danadananana!”  
And then, I don’t know why, I just started to tickle her. It always works with Ocean and I was stoned. I don’t know.  
I guess she was stoned too, because instead of swatting me off, she started giggling too and tickling me back.   
We were laughing together fit to burst when a person walking down in the street below yelled up at us, “Shut it already!”  
Me and City caught each other’s eyes by the light of the lamp on the other side of the door and wordlessly, caught by the same thought we both got the spit up in our mouths and gobbed it down on the cunt. Course, it didn’t hit, because by the time the spit hit the pavement the guy was already off down the street, but we both collapsed down to the dirty anticlimb paint giggling, it was just so hilarious, what with the weed and all on top of it. We sat and dangled our legs through the gaps in the railing smoking and giggling like teenagers. I was so happy inside, and pleasantly touched, too, like maybe Sy was off somewhere, over our shoulders watching us, glad we could finally make peace, patch up all our differences and be friends again after all these years, water under the bridge.  
“Hey,” I said, putting my arm around City’s shoulder, “we should go out and grab a real pint!” Almost said, it’s what Sy would’ve wanted, but had the presence of mind not to go there, at least.   
“In a second,” said City waving me off. “Trick’s almost ready.” She pointed at the last of the fag burning down between her fingers.   
I watch the glowing little orange circle as it burnt down hypnotized. And it burned, burned, burned her little ring of fire, and she didn’t stub it out, just let it sit there, not flinching, though alla time I could see the flame going down now, so low it was right between the skin of her fingers, and I reckoned it must be hurting her, burning her, there was a smell like burgers—  
“Aaaaah! City stoppit!” And before I knew it I was snatching the fag from her hand, singeing my own in the process, throwing it down to the grate. “Ouch! Fuck!” It rolled between the slats of the fire escape and fell, the little red light instantly snuffed out in the blackness of the night.   
The smell— like bacon—maybe that’s why…  
But City’s just laughing, rocking back against the wall. “Bloody hell!”  
“What? How are you not—You fucking burned yourself!”  
“Ah, ah, but that’s the trick! You should see your face!” she giggled.  
She was right, I’m sure I looked well sick. Where was a dustbin when you needed one?  
“Oh, don’t be so put out! Come on! I don’t feel it!” She waved her slightly smoking fingers in the air nonchalantly. “See, nuffink!”   
“Uh, yeah, that’s great,” I said, more disturbed than I reckoned I ought to be by this. “Let’s just get that pint now, eh?”

I was glad to distract her before any more weird shit went down. If only I’d known…“Look, uh, you want to hit up Camden. There’s this band playing at Proud I heard about, Chaps from Japan. I played some session for them on this track they were recording last month. They’re trying to break into the European market. For some reason they always wear swimming costumes on stage. No tops and they’re well fit. And while we’re there we can stop by the shop! Seriously, you’re going to love it!”


	21. City:  Old Friends II

CITY  
(London, UK)

6\. OLD FRIENDS II 

The next day I woke up on a squeaky couch. Someone, somewhere was blowing bubbles in a glass of water and running a motor. I blinked at the bright light streaming through the uncurtained windows, no wall separating the kitchen from the living room where I was sleeping. Could see the main door of the fridge, kids’ drawings sellotaped all over it. A pair of dalek shaped magnets patrolled the smaller door of the freezer. I moved my head and found meself looking into a pair of round black eyes. I was scared for a moment, like I was tripping, and I sawr it was just the eyes of these two big aquarium fish, staring at me from behind the glass. I sat up and stared back. They both raise their top fins higher like spikey yellow mohicans.   
I was barely hung over, though did take me a second to actually remember where I was. Last night, me n’ Ionee drinking and smoking, going down Camdenlock to the Market, up the Stables to her shite little shop. Proud Camden, more bevy, expensive cocktail type shite, band of Chinese guys ona stage. Nice hairless chests and then what?  
I’d not gone to see live music in ages. Since I don’t drum no more, just makes me feel odd to see it. But last night, last night I was actually okay with it. My whole plan about fucking over Ionee, destroying her from within, it was starting to seem a bit rubbish to me, not going to lie, yeah? You forget, all this time, building her up like she’s this monster and you forget how bleedin NICE she could be. Fooking disarming that. I mean we were fooking bonding, innit? She gave me a Ramones poster from her shop with a real Johnny Ramone certified signature on it and a Funko Pop figure of Steve Jones that it seemed she’d rather of kept for herself. She were just that swept up in the moment, y’ know? Probably the highlight for Ionee of our time in LA was the day we went on the “Jonesy’s Jukebox” radio program. I never thought I’d live to see the day—Ionee actually gobsmacked into silence meeting a famous person. Lucky me and Jams, on a bit of a high mood and extra chatty was there to pick up the slack in the convo. And she just gave her little Jonesy toy to me. I had the whole lot in a carrier bag and was feeling well chuffed as we sat down to drinks, ready to call the whole thing off. Then of course, it all gives pear shaped in no time.   
This fit bloke giving Ionee the wave from across the room. Definitely seen that cunt before, like maybe we dated ages ago when I lived in London. Attractive chap in every sense of the word, people moving closer in to him as he moved toward us, drawn in like iron filings to a magnet. “Oi, you know him?”  
“Oh, Euan? Ya, I played back up on a couple of songs on his new solo album.”  
“Euan? Wait—Euan Cosgrove? From the Roundabouts, Euan Cosgrove!”   
“Yeah, we were sort of fuckbuddies for a while, when he was on the outs with this other chick. Don’t say anything, yeahr? He hates being recognized for Roundabouts stuff, he’s all about going solo these past few years.”  
Bloody hell, even her fuckbuddies are famous. Still, dude’s not a patch on Sy. Fucking disloyal cunt is Irons. Disgrace to his memory.   
“Oh don’t give me that look City. Can’t be a nun, me.”   
“Well obviously, since you’re all Jewy and that.”  
“Ha ha. Plus I haven’t seen him in like, ages! Listen, I’m just going to tark to him, yeah? Just sit tight.”   
Like I had a choice?  
Then she’s all like “Oi! Euan, over here, luv!” and when he naturally don’t turn around-- because who the fook are we kidding here, this is Ionee and not Kate Moss or wha’ever, though she don’t seem aware, she just runs up and hugs him, fooking embarrassing as always.  
I was certain Mr. Roundabouts over there would just turn and walk away, leave her in the dust -- I mean Ionee was fit back in the day, but she ain’t nowhere in this bloke’s league anymore—but still, to me utter shock and disgust Cosgrove, instead a dumping her arse actually pulls her in close for a face-suck. Yech.   
“Eu-AN!” she says, pulling away, all fake coy.   
Okay, now I am more than ready to do a runner, but were like watching “Animal Attacks” on the telly. You know what you’re about to see is gonna make you sick, but you just can’t turn away.   
Also, I got no clue how to get back to Ionee’s flat from here.   
So Euan Cosgrove joins us for drinks-- though me, I’d not invited him-- and him and Ionee start talking about this and that person at the recording studio and blaggety blah, her showing off like she’s the dog’s bollocks or someit and all this time I’m looking at him—the handsome one from the Roundabouts, biggest mid-90s band outside Blur, Pulp and Oasis, and that vain, self-obsessed cunt never once looks in my direction, him. Might’ve just as well been a poster on me fooking wall. Least Ionee could’ve done was introduce me. But no, didn’t even say I was her bandmate, like I don’t even rate.  
I still can’t believe he shagged her. Probably pished off his nut and regretting it now. Dumpy little Ionee, all busy pulling the V neck of her top down a bit to give him more of that chubby pink cleavage, big tits resting roight on the tabletop like they’re someit to eat. I coulda poured a beer into that and that tit-valley would’ve held that liquid like a cup. Bleh! Fooking shameless she was, acting like she’s just gasping for a shag. She was smart so she should know-- a fit guy like him? He ain’t going near someone that obviou--  
“Hey, fancy a fag?” he goes.  
“’Kay,” goes Ionee all dumb and flirtatious.  
“Yeahr, hit me up,” I broke in.  
“Uh, who’s this?” he asked.  
“Oh!” Ionee facepalmed. “So, SO sorry Euan Cosgrove, this is City. City, Euan Cosgrove.”   
If she says his full name like one more time I’m going mental, I am serious.  
“We were in that old band I told you about together. The Fuck-Ups, yeahr. Manchester City, used to call her, like your hometown, eh?”   
“Just City actually,” I said and gave Ionee some of the old cut eye, but she didn’t even notice.   
“Oh yeah, what’d you play sweet’eart? Piano? Bass?” he’s asking.  
Ech, like just stay the fook away arsehole. “Drums.”  
“Yeah yeah, brilliant. Listen I…” and then he pulled up to Ionee and whispered something in her ear that made her giggle like a little kid. “You up for it?” he finished as he pulled back. Then she was nodding like a bobbly doll, all big pupils and swagger grin.   
“So, uh, City, here’s the thing, we uh, me and Euan, roight? We gotta pop round to my shop for a bit. I got something special I been saving back there for him…” naughty chortles at this from Euan, the cunt. “Look we’ll be back in just a tick. Hold the fort why don’tcha?”  
I narrowed my eyes at her. “I’ll come with you then, give Steve Jones back, I know it’s hard for you to part with him.”  
“No, no, you keep ‘im. We’ll be back in a sec.” Then she took a ten pound note out of her wallet and shoved it at me. “Have a few drinks on me, alright?”  
I eyed the ten quid. I wanted to go with her, I could’ve just got up and spoiled all her fucking fun with Mr. Popstar over there, but fook, I just needed another drink, too much shite going on today to deal with this bloody sober. “Fab, see you later.”   
“Cool, thanks luv, pleasure meeting you,” said Euan and reached over to give my hand a squeeze, saw it and fooking pulled back. “Errrrmm…”  
The fooking twat! Wot? He too scared to touch me? Thinks I got the fooking pox or someit? Dickhead like him—I just can’t even— shite’s out of order.  
Can’t believe Irons would stand for me to be insulted like that, too. On her fooking patch no less!  
But Ionee’s already pulling him away, eager to get her shag on.   
Fooking cow, hope he’s rubbish! Which is wot I’m thinking, when floating over their bloody shoulders I hear the same tired old fooking question, “Oi, wot’s up with her hand?” like I couldn’t fooking hear. Ask me to me face you cowardly shite!  
I was wearing a new watch, a Swatch divewatch I bought specially for going down to London, make sure I was in time for me trains all that. It was one of those ones with the dial you turn so you can set it to zero anywhere on the clock and time how long something goes. Fooking excellent for measuring exactly how long it takes for Euan and Ionee to have sexytimes down the shop. Fooking Ionee, thinks she’s God’s gift to the male species. How long’d it take for her to make that fooker cum, eh?  
Ten quid buys you exactly one and a half drinks in the overpriced poshed up shitehole they call the “Pride of Camden” or wotever sturpid handle it goes by these days. I’ve used it all up and still I’ve not even got a buzz on. Probably feeding us water and piss and thinking we’re too impressed by all their flash rockstar photos to notice.   
Then when there wasn’t nothing more to drink and the band was gone I started thinking, like about how when Ocean gave me the grand tour of the flat, I never sawr a room for Jams, just the two bedrooms; Ocean’s little one and the master, wot had this massive king sized bed in it. Ocean waving at it through the half-open door, her words coming back to me– “this is where Mum and Uncle Jams sleep.”   
Why’d I notice fooking crayon David Bowie and his ginoromous silver package and not that? No way was there two beds in that room. Not enough space in the damn flat for that. And I saw only the one bed, so Irons and Jams they had to be sleeping together… but was they shagging together?   
No way, no fooking way. I mean wasn’t Jams a gay? Could you switch sides like that? Was it done? Girls could, I heard. Happens alla time. Blokes… I tried to think of some and all I remembered was those films Irons and Jams used to go on about like they was so artistic and that, while all they ever was, was some poofty upperclass bloke in fancy dress whining about wanting to shag some other bloke for two bloody hours and it’s so boring you just want a Starship Troopers alien invasion to come’n wipe out the lot of ‘em. Well there was Hugh Grant in “Maurice,” so yeah, maybe it was theory possible. But Jams with Ionee? True, they were both fooking fat now, but I still couldn’t picture it. Why would he go out with her? He never went with me and he knew I wanted to fook him, don’t matter if he was a gay or not, long as he wore a condom to keep out AIDS and that. I even told him so once, but no dice, full stop.  
So wot the fook did she have to make him want to do her?  
Not to mention that Ionee was probably at that very second sucking off that fooking hasbeen from a 90s wannabe Oasis group in the backa her shop underneath that sturpid Velvet Revolver poster signed by David Kushner. (No idea who he is, but also sounds like a Jew, must ask Ionee for the positive ID when I don’t want to kill her). And I reckoned he’d be seeing her without her sparkly black leggings on, the prospect of which don’t seem to distress her in the least. In fact she seems pretty keen to get her kit off the quicker the better. Maybe she had tall socks?  
Nah, who’m I kidding? This’s Ionee we’re talking about. Bitch used to strut around hotel rooms, naked as a fooking mole rat, with only a hand towel covering the goods. Wouldn’t even draw the bloody curtains half the time, well pleased she was to give some “lucky bugger an eyeful.” Then there was that year she was breastfeeding Ocean. I swear you couldn’t turn a corner in that house in Topanga Canyon without getting eyefuls of tit every which way. Too many fooking hippies and shite around there, bad influence on ‘er, even her parents said so. Actually, I think she honestly got off on doing it in public, that breastfeeding shite-- the idea that all there was between her bare tits and public indecency just a few millimetres of cotton flannel in Baby Mickey print made her wet, I think.   
Fooking Ionee. I bet she just hops on the guy eager to give him a ride before he has a chance to think about anything else. Probably utters some cheesy wannabe clever line while she’s doing it too, the bitch. Not that she’s a complete dog’s breakfast, nice face I suppose, all things being equal, only problem is, she’s Ionee.   
God damnit, it’s getting hot in here. I wish she’d come back. Fooking Ionee, I’m nothing to her, you can see that now, roight? And that smug bitch still has all the cards; still plays the guitar, has her shop and her kid and Jams clearly still loves her and they’ve stayed friends (with benefits?) and she’s got that flat all on her own, doesn’t have to worry about pissing off her mum with a million stupid little dumbass infractions and did I mention Ocean? That one piece of Sy she can keep forever. And Ionee lets her dress like a bloody ragamuffin from the market! She was mine I’d dress her proper. Sy would’ve been around, he’da raised her right—‘cept if Sy was still around we’d have a kid of our own by now—a better one than dumb old Ocean. A boy maybe. But our future child isn’t here and Ocean is and she belongs to Ionee. And Ocean is just like the rest of them, all of ‘em blind to wot a massive twat Ionee is. But yeahr, of course Ocean just luuuuurrrrves her.  
And let me tell you not every little girl loves her mother. Mine’s a fooking alkie who tried to turf me from the house like it weren’t even part mine! But Ocean can’t see wot a cunt her own mum is. Just the two of them together against the world for most of Ocean’s life, like a team, because a kid like that don’t know any better. Her and Jams and Ionee, a proper family, just like the Fuck-Ups used to be. Only without me.  
Look, it’s time someone told the kid the truth. Time she knew wot her Mum really did to me and Sy back in LA. Ocean deserves it, she’s old enough to know now, ain’t she? Be doing her a favour, it would.   
This was some a wot I was thinking, pretending to sip me bevy, watching out of the corner of my eye as Ionee popped back in the room, hair looking like Einstien’s candy floss sister.   
I was shtum all the way to Willesden Green station, Ionee rabbiting on, rubbishing this film and that novel, none of wot I ever heard of; then onto, de-extinctifing wooly mammoths for some bloody reason and whether she’d really seen Chaz Jankel, keyboard from the Blockheads, buying a Cornish pasty at Paddington Station, and if it was him, should she ‘ave talked to him?  
Like I give a fook?  
For some people it’s the drink that gets them running at the mouth, but for her it’s the shagging. Now that I have a think back, I’m sure all that chatterboxing she did after her “creative meetings” with Sy in the back of the van were a direct result.   
Fooking disgusting.   
I left Funko Pop Steve Jones under the seat of the bus on purpose. Let some other lucky punter find him. But of course Ionee noticed and ran back up the steps of the bus to grab him, right before the bus pulled away. Fookit, I was done with Ionee and her patronizing gifts. Let ‘er keep him. Time to recover some dignity, yeah? I nodded off on the next bus we transferred to. Forget how I ended up back in her flat (which I am NOT calling Parklife because Blur are posers and rubbish), waking up way too early in the morning.  
The fish won’t quit staring at me. It’s on account of them not having eyelids. Don’t blink ever, fish. Then there’s a little thump downa hall. Flush of the loo, tap running and small feet on the lino-- Ocean.   
I watch her from under me blanket. Doesn’t bat a eye this one, on finding a stranger having a kip in the living room. Must be used to strangers of a sorts crashing her mum’s gaff. She just picks up the remote for the telly and turns up the sound.  
Rude that. My kid, I wouldn’t have watching the telly full volume while someone is obviously sleeping right beside her. I’m the guest, innit? Have some bloody respect. Honestly, kids today. Deserves what they get, them. Still, don’t do to appear too aggro right off the beat.  
“Hey hey, Ocean Spray.” I use her old pet name, giving my voice as much sleepiness as I can, like she just woke me up.   
“Oh, hi City. You sleep okay?”  
“Oh yeah, super comfy, this sofa,” I said, doing me best to put some smile into my words.   
“You hungry? You want some breakfast?”   
“Yeah, I’m famished. I could absolutely murder some toast. What do you have around here?”  
“Lots of stuff! Only I’m not allowed to use the stove or cook anything. I’m just supposed to do cereal with milk if I get up before everyone else, ‘cause I can’t really cock that up. But if you know how to boil eggs or do a fry-up, we got some in the fridge. Might be past due though, best check the date Mum always says. Only, I’m not allowed to cook until the grown-ups wake up.”   
“I’m a grown-up and I’m awake.”  
“Yeeaaaaahr. You think it’d be okay with Mum?”  
“Of course! How about we make omelettes?”  
“Yeah! Mum and Uncle Jams’ll be well surprised, won’t they?”  
“Oh, absolutely.”


	22. Ionee:  Don't Bring Me Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And now the shit really hits the fan...
> 
>  
> 
> XXXX

CITY  
(London, UK)

6\. OLD FRIENDS II 

The next day I woke up on a squeaky couch. Someone, somewhere was blowing bubbles in a glass of water and running a motor. I blinked at the bright light streaming through the uncurtained windows, no wall separating the kitchen from the living room where I was sleeping. Could see the main door of the fridge, kids’ drawings sellotaped all over it. A pair of dalek shaped magnets patrolled the smaller door of the freezer. I moved my head and found meself looking into a pair of round black eyes. I was scared for a moment, like I was tripping, and I sawr it was just the eyes of these two big aquarium fish, staring at me from behind the glass. I sat up and stared back. They both raise their top fins higher like spikey yellow mohicans.   
I was barely hung over, though did take me a second to actually remember where I was. Last night, me n’ Ionee drinking and smoking, going down Camdenlock to the Market, up the Stables to her shite little shop. Proud Camden, more bevy, expensive cocktail type shite, band of Chinese guys ona stage. Nice hairless chests and then what?  
I’d not gone to see live music in ages. Since I don’t drum no more, just makes me feel odd to see it. But last night, last night I was actually okay with it. My whole plan about fucking over Ionee, destroying her from within, it was starting to seem a bit rubbish to me, not going to lie, yeah? You forget, all this time, building her up like she’s this monster and you forget how bleedin NICE she could be. Fooking disarming that. I mean we were fooking bonding, innit? She gave me a Ramones poster from her shop with a real Johnny Ramone certified signature on it and a Funko Pop figure of Steve Jones that it seemed she’d rather of kept for herself. She were just that swept up in the moment, y’ know? Probably the highlight for Ionee of our time in LA was the day we went on the “Jonesy’s Jukebox” radio program. I never thought I’d live to see the day—Ionee actually gobsmacked into silence meeting a famous person. Lucky me and Jams, on a bit of a high mood and extra chatty was there to pick up the slack in the convo. And she just gave her little Jonesy toy to me. I had the whole lot in a carrier bag and was feeling well chuffed as we sat down to drinks, ready to call the whole thing off. Then of course, it all gives pear shaped in no time.   
This fit bloke giving Ionee the wave from across the room. Definitely seen that cunt before, like maybe we dated ages ago when I lived in London. Attractive chap in every sense of the word, people moving closer in to him as he moved toward us, drawn in like iron filings to a magnet. “Oi, you know him?”  
“Oh, Euan? Ya, I played back up on a couple of songs on his new solo album.”  
“Euan? Wait—Euan Cosgrove? From the Roundabouts, Euan Cosgrove!”   
“Yeah, we were sort of fuckbuddies for a while, when he was on the outs with this other chick. Don’t say anything, yeahr? He hates being recognized for Roundabouts stuff, he’s all about going solo these past few years.”  
Bloody hell, even her fuckbuddies are famous. Still, dude’s not a patch on Sy. Fucking disloyal cunt is Irons. Disgrace to his memory.   
“Oh don’t give me that look City. Can’t be a nun, me.”   
“Well obviously, since you’re all Jewy and that.”  
“Ha ha. Plus I haven’t seen him in like, ages! Listen, I’m just going to tark to him, yeah? Just sit tight.”   
Like I had a choice?  
Then she’s all like “Oi! Euan, over here, luv!” and when he naturally don’t turn around-- because who the fook are we kidding here, this is Ionee and not Kate Moss or wha’ever, though she don’t seem aware, she just runs up and hugs him, fooking embarrassing as always.  
I was certain Mr. Roundabouts over there would just turn and walk away, leave her in the dust -- I mean Ionee was fit back in the day, but she ain’t nowhere in this bloke’s league anymore—but still, to me utter shock and disgust Cosgrove, instead a dumping her arse actually pulls her in close for a face-suck. Yech.   
“Eu-AN!” she says, pulling away, all fake coy.   
Okay, now I am more than ready to do a runner, but were like watching “Animal Attacks” on the telly. You know what you’re about to see is gonna make you sick, but you just can’t turn away.   
Also, I got no clue how to get back to Ionee’s flat from here.   
So Euan Cosgrove joins us for drinks-- though me, I’d not invited him-- and him and Ionee start talking about this and that person at the recording studio and blaggety blah, her showing off like she’s the dog’s bollocks or someit and all this time I’m looking at him—the handsome one from the Roundabouts, biggest mid-90s band outside Blur, Pulp and Oasis, and that vain, self-obsessed cunt never once looks in my direction, him. Might’ve just as well been a poster on me fooking wall. Least Ionee could’ve done was introduce me. But no, didn’t even say I was her bandmate, like I don’t even rate.  
I still can’t believe he shagged her. Probably pished off his nut and regretting it now. Dumpy little Ionee, all busy pulling the V neck of her top down a bit to give him more of that chubby pink cleavage, big tits resting roight on the tabletop like they’re someit to eat. I coulda poured a beer into that and that tit-valley would’ve held that liquid like a cup. Bleh! Fooking shameless she was, acting like she’s just gasping for a shag. She was smart so she should know-- a fit guy like him? He ain’t going near someone that obviou--  
“Hey, fancy a fag?” he goes.  
“’Kay,” goes Ionee all dumb and flirtatious.  
“Yeahr, hit me up,” I broke in.  
“Uh, who’s this?” he asked.  
“Oh!” Ionee facepalmed. “So, SO sorry Euan Cosgrove, this is City. City, Euan Cosgrove.”   
If she says his full name like one more time I’m going mental, I am serious.  
“We were in that old band I told you about together. The Fuck-Ups, yeahr. Manchester City, used to call her, like your hometown, eh?”   
“Just City actually,” I said and gave Ionee some of the old cut eye, but she didn’t even notice.   
“Oh yeah, what’d you play sweet’eart? Piano? Bass?” he’s asking.  
Ech, like just stay the fook away arsehole. “Drums.”  
“Yeah yeah, brilliant. Listen I…” and then he pulled up to Ionee and whispered something in her ear that made her giggle like a little kid. “You up for it?” he finished as he pulled back. Then she was nodding like a bobbly doll, all big pupils and swagger grin.   
“So, uh, City, here’s the thing, we uh, me and Euan, roight? We gotta pop round to my shop for a bit. I got something special I been saving back there for him…” naughty chortles at this from Euan, the cunt. “Look we’ll be back in just a tick. Hold the fort why don’tcha?”  
I narrowed my eyes at her. “I’ll come with you then, give Steve Jones back, I know it’s hard for you to part with him.”  
“No, no, you keep ‘im. We’ll be back in a sec.” Then she took a ten pound note out of her wallet and shoved it at me. “Have a few drinks on me, alright?”  
I eyed the ten quid. I wanted to go with her, I could’ve just got up and spoiled all her fucking fun with Mr. Popstar over there, but fook, I just needed another drink, too much shite going on today to deal with this bloody sober. “Fab, see you later.”   
“Cool, thanks luv, pleasure meeting you,” said Euan and reached over to give my hand a squeeze, saw it and fooking pulled back. “Errrrmm…”  
The fooking twat! Wot? He too scared to touch me? Thinks I got the fooking pox or someit? Dickhead like him—I just can’t even— shite’s out of order.  
Can’t believe Irons would stand for me to be insulted like that, too. On her fooking patch no less!  
But Ionee’s already pulling him away, eager to get her shag on.   
Fooking cow, hope he’s rubbish! Which is wot I’m thinking, when floating over their bloody shoulders I hear the same tired old fooking question, “Oi, wot’s up with her hand?” like I couldn’t fooking hear. Ask me to me face you cowardly shite!  
I was wearing a new watch, a Swatch divewatch I bought specially for going down to London, make sure I was in time for me trains all that. It was one of those ones with the dial you turn so you can set it to zero anywhere on the clock and time how long something goes. Fooking excellent for measuring exactly how long it takes for Euan and Ionee to have sexytimes down the shop. Fooking Ionee, thinks she’s God’s gift to the male species. How long’d it take for her to make that fooker cum, eh?  
Ten quid buys you exactly one and a half drinks in the overpriced poshed up shitehole they call the “Pride of Camden” or wotever sturpid handle it goes by these days. I’ve used it all up and still I’ve not even got a buzz on. Probably feeding us water and piss and thinking we’re too impressed by all their flash rockstar photos to notice.   
Then when there wasn’t nothing more to drink and the band was gone I started thinking, like about how when Ocean gave me the grand tour of the flat, I never sawr a room for Jams, just the two bedrooms; Ocean’s little one and the master, wot had this massive king sized bed in it. Ocean waving at it through the half-open door, her words coming back to me– “this is where Mum and Uncle Jams sleep.”   
Why’d I notice fooking crayon David Bowie and his ginoromous silver package and not that? No way was there two beds in that room. Not enough space in the damn flat for that. And I saw only the one bed, so Irons and Jams they had to be sleeping together… but was they shagging together?   
No way, no fooking way. I mean wasn’t Jams a gay? Could you switch sides like that? Was it done? Girls could, I heard. Happens alla time. Blokes… I tried to think of some and all I remembered was those films Irons and Jams used to go on about like they was so artistic and that, while all they ever was, was some poofty upperclass bloke in fancy dress whining about wanting to shag some other bloke for two bloody hours and it’s so boring you just want a Starship Troopers alien invasion to come’n wipe out the lot of ‘em. Well there was Hugh Grant in “Maurice,” so yeah, maybe it was theory possible. But Jams with Ionee? True, they were both fooking fat now, but I still couldn’t picture it. Why would he go out with her? He never went with me and he knew I wanted to fook him, don’t matter if he was a gay or not, long as he wore a condom to keep out AIDS and that. I even told him so once, but no dice, full stop.  
So wot the fook did she have to make him want to do her?  
Not to mention that Ionee was probably at that very second sucking off that fooking hasbeen from a 90s wannabe Oasis group in the backa her shop underneath that sturpid Velvet Revolver poster signed by David Kushner. (No idea who he is, but also sounds like a Jew, must ask Ionee for the positive ID when I don’t want to kill her). And I reckoned he’d be seeing her without her sparkly black leggings on, the prospect of which don’t seem to distress her in the least. In fact she seems pretty keen to get her kit off the quicker the better. Maybe she had tall socks?  
Nah, who’m I kidding? This’s Ionee we’re talking about. Bitch used to strut around hotel rooms, naked as a fooking mole rat, with only a hand towel covering the goods. Wouldn’t even draw the bloody curtains half the time, well pleased she was to give some “lucky bugger an eyeful.” Then there was that year she was breastfeeding Ocean. I swear you couldn’t turn a corner in that house in Topanga Canyon without getting eyefuls of tit every which way. Too many fooking hippies and shite around there, bad influence on ‘er, even her parents said so. Actually, I think she honestly got off on doing it in public, that breastfeeding shite-- the idea that all there was between her bare tits and public indecency just a few millimetres of cotton flannel in Baby Mickey print made her wet, I think.   
Fooking Ionee. I bet she just hops on the guy eager to give him a ride before he has a chance to think about anything else. Probably utters some cheesy wannabe clever line while she’s doing it too, the bitch. Not that she’s a complete dog’s breakfast, nice face I suppose, all things being equal, only problem is, she’s Ionee.   
God damnit, it’s getting hot in here. I wish she’d come back. Fooking Ionee, I’m nothing to her, you can see that now, roight? And that smug bitch still has all the cards; still plays the guitar, has her shop and her kid and Jams clearly still loves her and they’ve stayed friends (with benefits?) and she’s got that flat all on her own, doesn’t have to worry about pissing off her mum with a million stupid little dumbass infractions and did I mention Ocean? That one piece of Sy she can keep forever. And Ionee lets her dress like a bloody ragamuffin from the market! She was mine I’d dress her proper. Sy would’ve been around, he’da raised her right—‘cept if Sy was still around we’d have a kid of our own by now—a better one than dumb old Ocean. A boy maybe. But our future child isn’t here and Ocean is and she belongs to Ionee. And Ocean is just like the rest of them, all of ‘em blind to wot a massive twat Ionee is. But yeahr, of course Ocean just luuuuurrrrves her.  
And let me tell you not every little girl loves her mother. Mine’s a fooking alkie who tried to turf me from the house like it weren’t even part mine! But Ocean can’t see wot a cunt her own mum is. Just the two of them together against the world for most of Ocean’s life, like a team, because a kid like that don’t know any better. Her and Jams and Ionee, a proper family, just like the Fuck-Ups used to be. Only without me.  
Look, it’s time someone told the kid the truth. Time she knew wot her Mum really did to me and Sy back in LA. Ocean deserves it, she’s old enough to know now, ain’t she? Be doing her a favour, it would.   
This was some a wot I was thinking, pretending to sip me bevy, watching out of the corner of my eye as Ionee popped back in the room, hair looking like Einstien’s candy floss sister.   
I was shtum all the way to Willesden Green station, Ionee rabbiting on, rubbishing this film and that novel, none of wot I ever heard of; then onto, de-extinctifing wooly mammoths for some bloody reason and whether she’d really seen Chaz Jankel, keyboard from the Blockheads, buying a Cornish pasty at Paddington Station, and if it was him, should she ‘ave talked to him?  
Like I give a fook?  
For some people it’s the drink that gets them running at the mouth, but for her it’s the shagging. Now that I have a think back, I’m sure all that chatterboxing she did after her “creative meetings” with Sy in the back of the van were a direct result.   
Fooking disgusting.   
I left Funko Pop Steve Jones under the seat of the bus on purpose. Let some other lucky punter find him. But of course Ionee noticed and ran back up the steps of the bus to grab him, right before the bus pulled away. Fookit, I was done with Ionee and her patronizing gifts. Let ‘er keep him. Time to recover some dignity, yeah? I nodded off on the next bus we transferred to. Forget how I ended up back in her flat (which I am NOT calling Parklife because Blur are posers and rubbish), waking up way too early in the morning.  
The fish won’t quit staring at me. It’s on account of them not having eyelids. Don’t blink ever, fish. Then there’s a little thump downa hall. Flush of the loo, tap running and small feet on the lino-- Ocean.   
I watch her from under me blanket. Doesn’t bat a eye this one, on finding a stranger having a kip in the living room. Must be used to strangers of a sorts crashing her mum’s gaff. She just picks up the remote for the telly and turns up the sound.  
Rude that. My kid, I wouldn’t have watching the telly full volume while someone is obviously sleeping right beside her. I’m the guest, innit? Have some bloody respect. Honestly, kids today. Deserves what they get, them. Still, don’t do to appear too aggro right off the beat.  
“Hey hey, Ocean Spray.” I use her old pet name, giving my voice as much sleepiness as I can, like she just woke me up.   
“Oh, hi City. You sleep okay?”  
“Oh yeah, super comfy, this sofa,” I said, doing me best to put some smile into my words.   
“You hungry? You want some breakfast?”   
“Yeah, I’m famished. I could absolutely murder some toast. What do you have around here?”  
“Lots of stuff! Only I’m not allowed to use the stove or cook anything. I’m just supposed to do cereal with milk if I get up before everyone else, ‘cause I can’t really cock that up. But if you know how to boil eggs or do a fry-up, we got some in the fridge. Might be past due though, best check the date Mum always says. Only, I’m not allowed to cook until the grown-ups wake up.”   
“I’m a grown-up and I’m awake.”  
“Yeeaaaaahr. You think it’d be okay with Mum?”  
“Of course! How about we make omelettes?”  
“Yeah! Mum and Uncle Jams’ll be well surprised, won’t they?”  
“Oh, absolutely.”


	23. Ionee: Broken Bones

9\. BROKEN BONES

Three hours later I was in the X-ray room and I could tell from the tech’s carefully schooled non-expression that this shit was most definitely not going to be all right, but all he said was “just let me show these films to the doctor.”   
I looked out the window as I waited. From there I could see Roundwood Park where I took Ocean sometimes to see the parrots and canaries. I thought about that time we’d had ice lollies, sitting on the patio of the park restaurant in the spring, with all the pretty vines and flowers in the trellis over head, just like a fairy bower from some Enid Blyton story.  
Aza, Jams’ mum had come to meet us at the hospital. She’d been called by the ambulance people, the only immediate family any of us had in town at the time. She was sitting in the waiting room watching Ocean now as my foot was X-rayed and Jams was being looked at by some other type of doctors for his head and getting stitches for that cut on his cheek.  
My ankle was killing me and I was trying so hard not to cry, but inside the panic was clawing at my stomach threating to come up in my throat. It was about Jams too, because he’d passed out in the waiting room before, as well. They said he was concussed and for a few seconds, back when he got back to consciousness he wasn’t proper responding to his name, scary shit, that. I remembered how when I was a kid, a boy at Shoshi’s school just tripped on the stairs, just tripped on the fucking stairs, mind, hit his head, stood up and walked around for a minute or two completely normal and then went into a coma and never came out of it. Stupid, senseless thing, some blood vessel just broke from the fall and bled into his brain and his mind was gone, just like that. And Jams hadn’t fallen on his own. I’d knocked him back, I’d threatened him with the broken glass. Assault. Me! I assaulted Jams.   
I could see them arresting me and taking Ocean away to foster care, see Jams dead, another partner killed by my own dumb self and then I felt all the air sucked from my lungs and my throat close up, knowing I’d buggered up nice and proper failed Ocean completely, yet again. It replayed in my mind, over and over again—that moment where I could’ve just stopped myself-- that horrid cracking sound. I had myself convinced it was all happening again, just before, only this time Jams was going to die instead of Sy.   
But we were lucky; Jams didn’t die.  
He was admitted for an overnight stay for observation, while I was prepped for surgery. Aza, Jams’ mum would be watching Ocean for the night at her flat in Golders Green. She brought Ocean over to say a tearful good-bye to me and I reassured her, as best I could, that I’d be okay, not really believing it myself.  
Then Aza made Ocean wait outside while we had a private talk.  
“So, you’ve made a right mess of things.”   
“I know, fucking butchered my ankle and—“  
She flapped the topic away with her hands. “Pssht! Not that. That’s nothing.”  
Easy for her to say, her foot wasn’t swollen the size of a football. “You seen Jams? Is he all right?”   
“They stitched him up and he’s conscious. His head hurts though and he’s dizzy. They scanned him for sub-something hemangiomas—“  
“Subdural hematomas,” I corrected her, “hemangiomas are birthmarks.” I still can’t help being a doctor’s daughter, even here.   
“And it looks like we’re in the clear…”  
“Just subcutaneous then. That’s a relief.”   
“The reason he was having trouble breathing, they think that was just a panic attack, but they’re keeping him here just in case, for psychiatric observation and that, past history of--well you know.” She waved a hand at the floor.   
I nodded, a world of painful memories of encapsulated by those three little words.   
“I’m so sorry Aza. Tell Jams, please tell him again from me that I’m scum and I’m sorry. City just made me lose my shit and--”  
“Enough!” The softly accented voice drifted from Old World class to the Elephant and back, like a velvet bag full of steel rivets. “Ionee, I feel—almost like you’re my own daughter. I care about you dear, I do. You’ll always have a place in my heart, but--”  
“Bu-ut what?” I ask as my voice cracked. Somehow I was crying yet again. Why couldn’t I stop already? Tears dripping down my nose making me cough, the pain in my leg and fear and hospital smells and-- the waterworks going full on now. Cease! Desist! But no joy there. And oh, I knew just what type of thing she’d be saying next.  
“But James is my child. There are things-- what he went through at the hands of that American boy,” she said, her gaze drifting off me, eyes clouded over with disturbing memories, “no human being, least of all my son-- no one should have to endure that. He’s just never known how to tell someone he’s done, that it’s time to stop. He’s afraid to be alone with his own mind he said. I don’t know what I did. I tried to raise him right, made certain he had everything! Maybe it were his father, not being there enough when he was little. It don’t matter now I guess, I just now I have to protect him. I know you’re not a bad person at heart, luv, but it just can’t happen again.”   
“And it won’t! I’m not that guy! You know me! I’d never—“   
But she just held up her hand. “Ionee, I made him promise me, made him swear, if anyone he lived with ever hurt him again, he’d get out of the situation-- don’t matter why or who or how good the excuse is, that was our deal.”  
“Please! It won’t happen again. I swear. You know I--”  
“I have to be firm with this. Jams—he’s too soft, forgives too easy, but just so you know, I’m sorry and wish you well.”  
“But this isn’t who I am!”  
“Maybe it’s for the best.” Patronizing pat on the hand. Fuck that. “Can’t live with you forever, now can he? Stopping with you and Ocean was supposed to be temporary. Isn’t it about time he’d a life of his own? Maybe you’re afraid of him gaining some independence, getting out there, not needing you like before?”  
Stuff him needing me. I need him!   
I wanted to get all shirty with her, but I gulped it down. No energy and plus, a girl’s gotta have some pride, right? Can’t make a scene in hospital.  
She left me waiting for the radiologist to return. Plenty of time to reflect on just how much I’d fucked up this time, sitting in my hospital gown and knickers, wondering when the extra strength nurofen would kick in. I rolled onto my side and turned my face to the wall. Hey you’ve got to hide your love away—only I had no one to love, only Ocean and now even she hated me. I cried into the disposable table cover, rubbing my eyes and nose all over the coarse paper, covering it in bogey slime, the thin tissue I grabbed in the waiting room long since shredded to bits.   
The last thing Aza said was, “I’m taking Ocean home now.” She had the keys off Jams apparently. “I can stay with her at your place until you’re sorted. Unless there’s someone you’d rather call. Shall I phone your mum, your dad, your sisters?”   
“No, no, oh God no, please don’t.”   
She raised an eyebrow at me, clearly disapproving. “You should at least tell your mother.”   
My parents! Shit! Suddenly, I was terrified. I hadn’t even thought-- what would they do? What would they say? How could I ever live this down? After all they’d done to help me after the crash, the expensive private physios in LA, helping me pay off my debts and the first year’s rent for the shop and—The shop! What to do with the bloody shop if I couldn’t go in to work and Jams wasn’t around and--  
“Fuck me!” I said to the empty room.   
But that’s not what happened. No one came along to fuck me and no one was going to fuck me for quite some time. This was on account of the surgery.  
Before they put me on the wheely bed to take me to surgery a cheerful surgeon and a resident came in to explain what they were going to do.   
Basically, my ankle was so truly buggered that, it no longer even existed as such. I am not fucking kidding. Basically your ankle isn’t just one bone, it’s the lower end of your fibia and tibia bones and the top of your foot and how they connect and join together to move up and down and to the sides. I had screws and cadaver bone grafts and putty and who knows what other shit inside mine since the crash, holding the whole fragmented mess of what bone I had left together and now the whole thing was shot.  
Turns out, it actually wasn’t so much the fall that did it. The hardware inside had gone all crumbly on the sly for years, weakening as the metal expanded and contracted with the weather, osteo-arthritis setting in as the previously mended bone grew cracked and porous around the screws. All it took was one hard thump for the whole set-up to finally snap altogether.  
“So can’t you just stick it back the way it was then?”   
“Well no, it’s a bit like humpty-dumpty— there’s really no solid bone in the joint large and sturdy enough left to fasten a pin to. We can’t put it back together again the way it was done before.”  
“So what’s to be done?”  
“So,” said the surgeon, with a cheerful flip of her tablet. She turned it around for me to see an image of leg and foot bones. Leg and foot bones with a metal bit stuck in there that ought not to be there. Ouch. “We’re going to use a special hose to suck all the broken bits out and then we’re going to shave the remaining bone down to the healthy bits, put some special cement on the ends and…” blah blah, did she just say special hose? Like it’s some fucking nursery program—oooh let’s use the special magic glue! Where’d they transfer this twit in from, the pediatric ward? “Usually they do a fusion at this stage, but then it’ll rob you of movement, don’t you see? So we’ve been having luck with this titanium joint replacement. Once it heals it should allow you free movement, just like before. The only thing is eventually all artificial joints wear out and need a revision.”   
“Revision? What like an exam review from school?”  
“Ha ha, no, just the procedure redone.”  
“Redone again?”  
“Yes.”  
“And how often does that occur?”  
“Mmm.. every 5 to 10 years on average.”  
“Well, that’s shitty.”  
“It’s the best we have at the moment.”  
“Sure whatever, let’s just get it done yeah? And more pain medicine please, this fucking kills.”  
“I’ll have a nurse bring an extra strength paracetomol.”   
“Ta.” Might as well try to dig the foundation of Windsor Castle with a fucking spoon. “Right then let’s get the tablets, then to surgery. This is fucking agony.”   
“We’ll have stronger measures for pain management for you afterward, so not to worry. Now you have you had anything to eat or drink other than water in the past three hours?”  
“No, nothing, so let’s go and get it over with, yeah?”   
“Look, we’re legally obligated to tell you this stuff before we operate. Oh, and you also have to sign this.”  
She pushed a piece of paper on a clipboard towards me. I read the first line just to make sure they weren’t planning on taking my kidneys or sawing the damn thing off, but then my eyes started to blur. “Aw fuck it,” I said and signed.   
“So you haven’t had anything to eat or drink in the past three hours?”  
“You already asked me that, and no-- because your emergency room people kept me waiting for ages and the cafeteria staff are on strike!”  
“That’s good then, we can operate right away. Any more questions?”  
“Wait, how long’ll I have to be off my leg for?”  
“Oh, 12 should do it I should think,” she said looking down at the clipboard to make sure I’d signed.  
“Twelve days?”   
“Did I say that? Weeks. I meant weeks.”  
“Wait, are you sure I need to have the thing replaced? I mean couldn’t I just— Are there any other options?”  
“Well, like I said, they can fuse the bones together and bypass the joint completely—“  
“Great, I’ll take that—“  
“But that takes slightly longer to heal—“  
“Longer than twelve weeks?”  
“Yes.”  
“Blimey.”  
“If you do opt to have the bones in the joint fused, you have to realize the ankle will be fixed in an ‘L’ position.” She showed me a picture on her ipad. I was reminded of those “Melancholy Jesus On a Cross” paintings all those Renaissance audiences used to go mad for. Except someone had clearly done a shit job with the nailing the feet part because they’d had to use so many nails, all going every which way. Just think, this could be you someday! My stomach flopped as the junior doctor looked on.   
Obviously, using tech was a big draw for him, the patient sitting there in fucking agony? Not so much so. “That’s brilliant! You have to tell me the website!”  
“Yeah, it’s www dot MD slash—“  
“And the result?” I broke in.  
“Result?”  
“Of the operation?”  
“Oh you won’t be able to move your foot up and down or walk naturally without a special insert in your shoe for--“  
“How long?”  
“Oh forever, I should think. That’s what ‘permanently fused’ means.”   
“Forever,” I repeated miserably. Some choice.   
“So really, I think, getting the replacement is your best bet. Even if it is a newer procedure, you’re still young and probably used to leading a fairly active life. If this doesn’t work we can easily move on to the fusion as a next step,” she said with a shrug. This was not strictly true, but I didn’t exactly know that at the time. Like I said, I really, really should’ve called Mum.   
“Okay, yeah, great let’s do the replacement,” I said and promised myself that soon as I was off the crutches, I was finding City and ripping her a nice new asshole. At least the anger stopped most of the fucking tears.


	24. Ionee: The Boy with the X-Ray Eyes

10\. THE BOY WITH THE X-RAY EYES

I was in the hospital for three days afterward. Jams came to see me the day after the surgery. There were big dark circles around his eyes and stitches on his cheek. He told me the doctor said the rings around his eyes were called “panda eyes,” the result of a skull fracture.  
“Oh God, really Jams?”  
“Yeah, I know. Panda eyes? I mean how is that even a medical term? Sounds like cosmetics for Essex girls.”  
“I’m so very very sorry,” I whispered.  
“You said that already, like twenty times, not counting the million times you said it yesterday.”  
“That’s still not enough. Does it hurt very much?”  
He shrugged. “On drugs, hard to tell. I should be discharged tonight. I’ll go home and look after Ocean with Mum. I can stay until I’m better and you’re up and about on your own, but I think after that, it’d be better if I left.”  
“Jams please don’t. Are they really letting you go home so soon? Don’t they have to put your head in a bandage?”  
“Nah. Just stitched up the back.” He showed it to me. There was patch of hair shaved away about the size of my palm and a line of purple stitches. Just looking at it made me feel nauseous. “No headstands for a while I guess,” he joked weakly. “How about you?”  
“Twelve weeks until I can put any weight on my foot. How long’s that in months?”  
“Two and a half I think.”  
“Shit. I’ve really fucked things up good and proper now. If I could go back-- Jams I didn’t think, I really didn’t think. I was just that angry, lashing out. I should’ve been awake before to protect Ocean, not hungover and sleeping. It’s all my fault! How could I let City alone with her? Stupid, stupid, stupid! You don’t know-- since I woke up, I’ve been lying here and I just keep getting these memories, coming back and there’s nothing to do, I can’t escape them. Not here.”  
“Yeah,” said Jams and he looked down at his hands, black leather gauntlets on his wrists and I could just see him remembering when they were bandages instead.  
He brought his hands up now to play with the material at his neck like he always did, a little startled to find it wasn’t there.  
Ah, so that’s why his appearance seemed so strange today. It wasn’t just the eyes. Through the fog of drugs I finally realized why his appearance seemed so strange today. It wasn’t just the panda eyes.  
They’d taken his scarf.  
I only think I’d seen the scar on his neck a handful of times in the past several years under bright light conditions. In the shadow of our bedroom at night didn’t count. It wasn’t that big or scary looking, just a slender silver line that looked like any other fold of skin on first glance. Who ever really looks that hard at another person’s neck anyway? A stranger’d never notice unless they were right up close.  
“Not the point,” he’d said. “I’d notice.” The gauntlets and scarves were for him; To keep, functional, together, present day Jams from being constantly reminded of what happened to Jams of the past. To protect himself from himself from memories that tried to suck you back to that place you don’t want to go back to, that you, you’d worked so hard to get away from.  
“Sorry about your foot,” he said.  
“Fuck’s sake, don’t apologize. It’s my own damned fault, innit? Me and fuckin’ City! How’s she manage to get under my skin, still after all this time?”  
He shrugged, drugged and distant. “I’ll be alright, it’s okay.”  
“No, it’s not, not really.”  
“But it will be. When you’re better, we’ll talk, get our living situation sorted. It’s time I was out on me own anyway.”  
“I know, I know, Aza already came and talked to me.” Somewhere within the puffy purple donuts around his eyes I thought I saw a sliver of pity I could work at.  
“Just give it the twelve weeks, yeah? At least until I get the cast off. I don’t know how I’ll manage otherwise, Jams. I’m sorry to have to ask you, but otherwise how’ll I take care of Ocean? Bollocks, how’m I even going to get up the stairs to the flat? I guess I can always scoot up on my bum, but--”  
“Twelve weeks. I’ll stay, I promise.”  
I lay back on the pillow, slightly less panicked now that I had his promise. Jams wouldn’t go back on his word and I could still worm my way back into his affections in that time, make him realize how much I still cared for him, make him forget all this craziness. He’d get over it. It’d be a long road, but we’d recover. We’d be back to normal in no time, I tried to convince myself. No time at all.  
The same day I got a call from Mum and Dad. They didn’t know about my visit to the A and E. They just call to chat like they do every weekend.  
I was about to tell them what happened, honestly I was, but then Mum starts in crying, saying Bubie’s sick and that. Heart failure. She wasn’t in the hospital, just at home, getting medication, but the cardiologist said without an operation to clear away the plaque or replace her heart valves she’d die within the next six months. Bubie was 90 years old and refused any drastic surgical intervention because the doctors said she might die on the table. Mum sobbed as she told me. Personally, I thought she ought to go for the operation, I mean either she lived and was well again or she died and at least it’d be quick, right? None of this long lingering bullshit.  
Okay, not one of my shining daughterly moments or anything, but I was a little disinhibited at the moment. Mum stopped talking, affronted and shocked, before bursting into tears. Apparently, the drugs did nothing for my usually smaller-than average capacity for not saying anything inappropriate.  
With Mum so overwhelmed with Bubie problems and now brassed off with me to boot, it was just the wrong time to tell her I buggered up my ankle again. Just the thought of getting into it—all the medical details she’d want to know about the surgery that I wouldn’t be able to remember—then explaining my fight with Jams— and City’s reappearance—then all the I-told-you-so’s about getting involved with Mum’s least favourite of all my friends again-- If I started talking about even one tiny part of it--she’d start get all the facts out of me, drawing them out one at a time, pulling at the threads until the whole truth unraveled in front of her of just what a shit-tastic mess her failure of a daughter made yet again. Her thinking I was my father’s daughter and all that. Fuck that.  
At least I didn’t have to get some stranger to carry me up the stairs when I got home. Jams was there. Poor sweet Jams. He didn’t complain as he hoisted me up on his back, although I half-drowned in embarrassment anyway.  
I stayed in bed for a week, only getting up to use the toilet, foot elevated “above the level of my heart,” as the poetic sheet from the hospital instructed, drugged to the gills on painkillers.  
Eventually, I could get off most of the drugs and make my way around the flat on crutches. I made the sandwiches, cooked dinner, folded clothes, helped Ocean with her homework and called in the store orders while Jams went back to work in the shop. When he was out I half-heartedly looked for City’s address and the card she supposedly gave him. I never found it, which was probably for the best.  
The shop had to keep on running, even if neither one of us really should have been working. It wasn’t making any money closed and the rent was steep in the Stables. I put in some work from home making mix CDs of hard to get music, bootlegs for some of our select customers, “sweetening” a few of Euan’s dull songs on Pro Tools to make into CDs for him and his new band to sell at their gigs. Apparently, all I was good for now. At least he paid something other than “exposure.” How much longer I’d continue in this sideline, I couldn’t say. The end of the era of music on some kind of physical medium was just over the horizon. Now music was in the airwaves, stored in unbelievably tiny ipods, moving around us at the speed of light, fibreoptic.  
We didn’t talk about what happened, Jams and me, just sliding back into our old routines, only with less talking, more silences between us, more pain.  
After twenty-three days at home I was nearly climbing the walls. Somehow I convinced Jams to bring me along to the shop. It took us so long to get, with him waiting on me at every transit changeover that we had to open an hour late, but it felt good to be back. Even if I just sat behind the counter and rang up people’s purchases all day, me and Jams were working together again as a team and I was sure he wouldn’t leave after that. The awkwardness began to diminish with time and I hoped Aza’s talk of him leaving was just the fear and anger of the moment and not something he’d remain true to.  
Though Ocean tried the silent treatment with both of us, she caved after just one day and we were back to talking and laughing and yelling at each other again, which I much preferred to silence. Still, she seemed more distant than she had before, something I tried to tell myself would resolve in time as well.  
Having to stay completely off my right foot was hard. I couldn’t even wear one of those plastic walking boot things. I had to quit teaching Sebastian, although the horror of his driving did help soften the blow. Apparently, he was still into learning guitar though, so I gave his number to Jams and let him take over. I thought Jams would appreciate it, a gesture of good will on my part, throwing handsome little Seb his way. Strangely enough, it seems both me and Jams favour the same type. I suspected the attraction for a while, just hearing the way Jams talked about Seb to me and Ocean, but I didn’t say anything. No need to rock the boat when things between us still felt so tenuous.  
I was beginning to get back pain from using crutches all the time. Some days it all just felt like too much and I’d say fuck it all, spend all day sulking in the flat with my useless foot up on the coffee table. Occasionally, when this got too lonely, I’d let Ocean stay home from school and we’d do Dr. Who and Sarah Jane Adventures marathons. It was during one such binge viewing spree that Ocean casually mentioned that she’d seen Jams and Seb kiss when Seb dropped Jams off at Parklife after a lesson.  
This annoyed me because: a) if Seb was by Parklife, why wouldn’t he come up to check on me? I mean surely he knew I’d was laid up and desperate for something more attractive to stare at other than Ocean’s drawing of David Bowie. b) From this I gathered he clearly didn’t fancy me at all, not even in a friend sort of way, which kind of hurts the old self-esteem, not that it’s been great shakes lately to begin with. And c) Jams drove in a car with Seb? Seb who’d nearly killed me with his bad driving and Jams knew it and still…Shit, Jams must really like him to put up with that. Or was I just too easily freaked out due to past experience, rendered a shitty judge of driving thanks to a touch of PTSD?  
The night I found out, I sat on the narrow couch by the telly in a snit, refusing to budge. Eventually Jams, in a most uncharacteristic Un-Jams-like motion actually just picked me up and placed me on the bed beside him. I was so gobsmacked by the move, I didn’t even protest. It felt good to be embraced by him even if it was just from him carrying.  
“Can’t have you rolling over in the night and hurting yourself again,” he explained sheepishly as he placed me down on the duvet beside him. What could I do? Letting him have Seb without argument seemed the best way to make peace at the time. After all, it wasn’t like he was poaching, there’s no way I could have a relationship with Seb anyway because of his driving.  
I honestly didn’t think Jams would really leave, not after I felt we were starting to get along again. But twelve weeks later, I traded my crutches and cast in for a walking stick and a black Darth Vader boot and Jams was gone the next day.  
I called his mobile, terrified and furious. I won’t embarrass myself now with the pathetic attempts, pleading, threats, wheedling, barbed comments, emotional blackmail and finally outright shouting I aimed his way trying to get him back. Safe to say none of it worked.  
He still wouldn’t give me City’s number either, although to ask for it then, so I could tell City off for my misfortunes in the middle of begging him to stay was probably a stupid tactic. I don’t know why I did it, except that it seemed my last chance to give that lying cunt a piece of my mind.  
Also, and perhaps this was my worst mistake, I fired him. I fired Jams. I know, I know. I was angry and it was the only thing I had to retaliate with-- his job. A job he only had thanks to me and we both knew it. He floored me by saying he didn’t care. According to him, he was looking to leave anyway. Him and Seb looking to open a business together. He’d only stayed at the shop because he thought I’d not be able to manage it with my leg.  
Bullshit, I thought.  
But it wasn’t. A month later I found out through Ocean that Jams and Seb opened a B and B in Brighton catering to gays and it was going smashingly.  
Well fuck me.  
Except nobody wanted to. Which was another problem. Months went by in a sexual desert with no oasis in sight. I felt like the Phantom of the Opera, hiding in my opera house, “with no comfort anywhere,” even if it was just the comfort of hugging another person. It got so bad I even started doing frottage on the tube.  
Basically, frottage is when you go into a crowded tube car, just so you can stand in close to another person and touch them. I’d rock up behind some sufficiently handsome, well groomed specimen and stand with my shoulder just brushing up against his back, feeling the tingle of that simple contact, pure excitement after so long without masculine touch. If the tube stopped suddenly and I jostled forward a bit, putting my actual hand against his waist or bum to steady myself, so much the better. I’d just pretend I slipped with my walking stick and step back politely from him, the gentleman in question none the wiser that he’d just fulfilled my desperate quota of human touch for another week.  
I got skilled enough that I could just slightly rock up my groin to the fellow’s bum cheek without them knowing. Just a brush, but it was enough. I was glad tight pants were getting popular again for men. It made it easier to look at bums, especially when I was sitting down and they hovered in my face, to know which ones were the best to rub up against by mistake. The small, secret sexual frision, that no one could see and in such a public place, too, provided a tiny sliver of relief and joy in that great freaking swamp of pain and gloom that was now my sad little life.  
I thought about going online to find a guy. There were plenty of sites for that. I done it before. Only I had to think of Ocean. I didn’t have anyone else to take care of her and then there was my confidence which was currently shot to shit. I’d gained weight sitting around so much with my foot up and there was the still healing leg to contend with.  
Not that I hadn’t pulled, and pulled fairly decently in worse physical and mental shape before. Hey, if you’re not too picky and you’re female, you can pull anywhere, you know how to do it right. Back in LA, I did it straight off the accident too though I was a lot slimmer int hose days. Not that I’m proud of it or anything, but I even did a couple of guys I met in physio at the rehab centre. Of course I had more energy then. These days, I don’t know, I just feel permenantly knackered.


	25. Ionee: Hateful

11\. HATEFUL

I’m starting to maybe hate myself. It’s not healthy, but there you go. What happened with Jams—I feel like a bully, no not a bully—a City, and that’s infinitely worse. I been an overbearing wanker to Jams and to Ocean and even if it wasn’t for long and I’d paid a heavy price, I still didn’t trust myself to act like me now. Like what if I got into with a guy and I hurt him the way I’d hurt Jams? I just didn’t want all that pressure-- taking care of yet another person’s emotional wellbeing. I just didn’t have anything left in the tank. No energy, no motivation. Easy enough to let the washing up stand in the sink. Can’t even make myself happy, what right did I have, taking on responsibility for another person’s happiness? Why try? I’d just fuck it up again anyway. I was the anti-Midas. Everything I touched turned to shit.  
Mum—thinking of her finding out what I’ve done, filled me alternately with dread and yearning and shame. I wished she was here to take care of me, but I keep telling myself the reality of it, the strength and power of her love and personality—she would try to take over, weak as I am now and open to suggestion, and this independence was so hard won. I don’t want to lose control, to be indebt to her for even more than I already am. She needs me to be strong for her now, through what’ll probably be my Bubie’s last illness, instead of me shifting the attention back on myself once more, multiplying her problems, leeching away her money and attention yet again.   
Every week I promised myself I’d tell her and Dad next time I called. Only the longer I left it, the easier it got just to put it off again. If you’re human you know that stagnant inertia feeling, when you convince yourself it’s better to remain schtum, rather than rock the boat with honesty that might hurt more people than it helped.   
Bubie was deathly ill and I, despite the pain in my foot and the decimation of the best friendship I’d ever had, wasn’t in mortal danger.   
I just had a bad ankle, I wasn’t dying or anything. Informing Mum could wait. And then when it looked like the whole business was almost over and the cast was coming off, there no longer seemed a point in telling her anyway. And still, Bubie continued on as before, dying slowly, but much more slowly than the doctors first suspected.   
Again, me and Ocean on our own and everything a mess. I was holding down both my shift and Jams’s at the shop, that is, when I could get myself to go, coming home completely knackered every night. Worst of all, I was still worrying about how Ocean felt about me, if she still hated me inside.   
Plus, no matter how many exercises physio forced me to do, the joint still couldn’t flex to move my foot up and down even just a little bit. That wasn’t such a big deal, but it hurt all the time, too and that was the worst. I kept thinking I only had to put up with it for a little bit longer and it would mend itself. Only a little bit longer and Jams and Sebastain would row and he’d come back. I just had to wait it out.   
But I’m not so good at waiting. And after six months without progress, I got X-rayed again. The “new and improved” ankle looked alright in the X-ray, but it didn’t feel right. Nobody seemed to know why. It was all could-bes and maybes. What the fuck do these people get paid for anyway? Like maybe the cement on the end of the bone where it met the artificial part was a little too thin or could be it grew in slightly misaligned, hard to say exactly, blah blah blah. You shouldn’t be having this much pain, they said. To really get a good look we’ll have to open it up again, they said. And then the surgeon said the word I’d been dreading all along: “revision.”   
To my embarrassment I burst into tears. “You’ve got—you’ve got to be bloody joking. I have to go through all this—AGAIN? You guys messed up and now I have to- have to--?”   
“We didn’t mess-up,” said the surgeon. I could hear the air quotes in her voice, the scorn. Who was I talk to her this way? For the umpteenth time in the past few months I wished my mum was there and not just because she was my mum, doctors have pull with other doctors. Me, I’m just some patient, bothersome, with weird looking hair, taking up extra time. “We didn’t mess up. You have to understand, yours is a complicated case. The extensive scar tissue from your previous injuries makes this sort of thing a little unpredictable.”  
“But wasn’t that your job? To make sure it went properly? And couldn’t you have guessed the thing about the scar tissue? I mean you could see—“  
“Yes, we did think it possible that this might happen, however—“  
“But you didn’t tell me it was possible!”  
“I don’t remember my exact words, but I think you’ll recall that you were rushing me to finish up so you could get into surgery.”  
Shit, that was true. Still… “I was in pain,” I said.  
“We’ll need to book the surgery now if you want to get in before the Christmas holidays. Usually the wait period can go between two to four months before you can go in, so we really must book you now.”   
“I can’t. That’s the busiest time of year at my shop. Please, what happens if I don’t have the operation? I can’t take 12 weeks off, not with no one to care for me. I have a kid I got to take care of too. Please, what are the other options—“  
“We can preform a salvage ankle fusion, like I said before and fuse the tibia to—“  
“Which you told me before would take another three months or whatever. How is that any different? What else do you got? Listen, I’ll do physio, loads of it, anything you know, I just can’t stick more operations.”   
“I’m afraid I can’t really recommend a non-surgical solution for this. I’m a surgeon after all, so perhaps I’m biased, but--”  
“Is there someone else then? A non-surgeon, you could send me to?”  
“Not really, you’ll have to find someone for yourself, as I don’t recommend it,” she said stiffly, as if I’d horribly offended her and she wasn’t the one to put my parts in the wrong way and then act like it was my fault that the surgery didn’t work.   
I limped out of the examining room pissed as hell.   
Look, all she had to do was say, “Shit man I’m sorry. I feel terrible. We messed up. But don’t worry, you’ll get fixed up. We’ll make sure you get the best treatment and we won’t rest until you’re up and about like before, no worries mate, I promise you’ll be fine. We’ll help you take care of your daughter, since this is our fault.” But no, of course not. Sometimes I get the sneaking suspicion that one of the first lessons some of these docs learn in med school is “first, don’t ever admit you’ve made a mistake.”   
Too fucking arrogant to say a simple “sorry.” Either that or too scared of losing face to let in any doubt that she was anything other than unassailable.   
I looked over at the other poor sods in their casts and boots and metal frames and crutches in the hall. Not me. Not again.   
Screw this scene, you don’t need it, I told myself. You’ll be fine, do the physio, take the pills, get used to the limp, who cares, whatever, it’s fine, forget about it. Screw this scene and just get on with your shit.  
So that’s what I tried to do.   
I kept wearing the brace I’d had to buy, (nothing free in this life, innit?) after they let me out of the Darth Vader boot, it looked like a plastic “L” that went under the heel and up the back of the ankle and calf and velcroed across in the front. Keeping my ankle immobilized like that helped the pain. It wasn’t supposed to be good for the muscles, but at least it made walking bearable for no, even if I did have quite the limp. As long as I didn’t push myself on long treks or stand around for too long on it I was mostly okay. It wasn’t graceful and I think all the codeine to keep the pain in check that I was taking was starting to give me reflux, but I was functional at least, and good enough for now. Work didn’t entail too much walking or standing if I didn’t want it to. “My shop, my rules,” as it said behind the counter. This meant I could sit on the high swivel chair behind the computer screen most of the day alternating between being extra friendly with prospective customers and trying to kill shoplifters with the searing power of my psychic glare a la “Scanners.”   
After all these years of going by the curious Victorian era James Smith and Sons Umbrella and Gentlemen’s Walking Stick Emporium at Tottenham Court Road on our way to Forbidden Planet for more Dr. Who toys, for once we actually had a reason to go inside. As Ocean amused herself pretending we’d time travelled back to the 1800s, as I procured for meself a walking stick with an eight ball for a handle. It was made for a man of course, but I waited while they cut it down to size for me in the back and Ocean tried out as many umbrellas as she could while the proprietor worked.   
I walked out of the shop, feeling rather flasher than I had in a while, as I let Ocean drag me on to the Planet in anticipation of the week’s new comics.   
I went back to work with a vengeance, pouring all my energy into that. Ocean and me got back to a normal-ish routine. I wanted to do more physio, but by the end of the day I was so knackered, running the shop by myself, looking after Ocean and keeping Parklife together, I just didn’t have the energy for anything else, let alone hauling arse to some place all the way across town to be bent and stretched in various painful and exhausting ways.   
Even though I was the main cook in the house now, the dinners weren’t getting any better either. The cooking was mostly Jams’s lookout anyway. If I’m going to be honest, I’m sort of a ramen noodles and microwave pizza kind of girl most of the time so that’s what we had. I’d always thought of food as just fuel, nothing more. As long as it didn’t make you sick and kept you going, it was all right by me. Unfortunately though, this sensible philosify didn’t pass muster with Ocean. She remained unimpressed with pretty much everything I tried.  
Three times I took Ocean to meet up with Jams for lunch when he was in town from Brighton. It hurt so much to see him, this man I’d secretly and not so secretly loved all these years. My beautiful boy. Even if he’d never seen me in that particular light. I didn’t say anything. I just turned away before he could spot me. I couldn’t bloody well face him, not as I was. He texted me the times I was to come and pick up Ocean and we arranged it all that way, but later I grilled Ocean about all he’d said to her, eager to make sure he was doing well and that Seb was treating him properly. I was glad to see he seemed to be staying on his meds and running on an even keel. Seb seemed to be good for him, which was more than I could say for me own sorry self who’d nearly brained him half to death. I wished him well in my heart. I reckon at least one of us deserved some happiness.  
Ocean helped me out when we had heavy traffic at the shop on the weekends, me taking advantage of her desire to stack boxes and put away CDs or just about anything at all instead of doing her homework.   
“See? Everything back to the normal routine,” I told her like a pitchman on a TV ad, leaning on the stick with one hand and sweeping the floor with the other, “only now with bonus mother-daughter time!”   
Ocean only smiled faintly as she stacked the CDs. I kept trying to get her to laugh with my stupid antics, but they rarely seemed to work these days.   
I forgot to do the bloody stretching exercises at home. What was the point? To be honest, it was all I could do just to drag myself upstairs and fall asleep on the couch with Ocean eating takeaway and doing her homework, (at least that’s what I think she was doing) on the kitchen table.   
I’d forgot how much Jams had done around here, especially where helping me with Ocean was concerned and I wasn’t even my normal self these days. It was past a year now since. I was still hobbling and it was starting to piss me off. Sometimes I’d wake up in the night and my leg would be all seized up, the muscles and scar tissue and whatever weird shit they’d sewn in there aching, cramping like a bitch.  
I’d take a pill and then wait for it to take effect. The only thing I could do during that time was to sit there, on the half empty bed with my headphones jacked into the electric guitar. I’d play and play and play until I was exhausted, until the meds took effect and I could sleep again. The sound is just so mellow sometimes, it’s like it vibrates the cords inside your soul and relaxes you. There’s nothing like it for soothing the soul.   
Then before I knew it the kitchen timer was buzzing and I was dragging myself up again, barely able to keep my eyes open. Time to get Ocean up for school, then spend the next day falling asleep on my chair at the shop, trying to keep myself from doing a complete faceplant into the computer while shoplifters went to town, nicking all the gloves and hats from the front display by the door.   
And that’s how it went that year, trying to keep our heads above water. I knew I wasn’t being a fun mum, that I was rather depressed and it was wrong for me. Down is not my natural mode. I think of my spirit as buoyant—sort of like a jellyfish, but with eyes. I knew it would be ages before I could get my shit fully back together, but I was working on it, trying to do a little more every day to help myself along. But progress seemed nonexistent. As for paying the bills, all I seemed to be able to do was making my credit card minimums, which weren’t so minimal anymore, filling a hole that was getting deeper all the time. A few times I hit up the folks for money, but I felt like pure scum doing it as usual. Without Jams’ half of the rent and paying for the shopping, I wasn’t sure how much longer Ocean and me could afford Parklife at all.  
I sat in the tall computer chair behind the counter of my shop with paperbacks, the internet and a drawing pad on hand to pass the time. And sometimes I would sit alone there, with only my thoughts, just thinking to myself “Someday things’ll be different.” Willing it to be so, still I couldn’t imagine yet exactly how that would happen. “Different” how? Better, please make it better.  
Still, I hoped that “someday” would hurry up and fucking get here already. I was that impatient for my life to change.  
And then it really did.


	26. City:  Kick Out the Jams

CITY MARTINGALE  
(Sheffield, UK)

12\. KICK OUT THE JAMS

 

It took a whole week for Jams to bell me after I left London. I was at Mike’s bar where I work part time. He’s me great uncle or someit and I think me mum sort of guilted him into giving me a job, so at least she done something for me once in my life. Not that the place is so busy-- fucking nobody comes here except the old punters stopping by for a pint on the way to Ladbrokes to bet on the dogs and ponies. Half the time I’m late or don’t bother to show up and he doesn’t give me any stick about it. Nice bloke him.   
Hate the punters though. No excitement to be had off any a them. Same god-damn stories about the old crew at the engine factory they closed way back in the 90s and being bombed out in the blitz and how things was better back in the day before immigrants come and wrecked the country. Like any of them want to come here? Immigrant’s’re smarter than us lot at least, they go to London where the jobs are while these miserable bellends keep hanging on, born and die not twenty clicks from where their granny kicked off and twice as ignorant.  
Day after day it’s like nothing’s happened here for twenty years. Shit’s so boring you honestly have to be half-pissed just to make it through the week without topping yourself. So far I’m spending a quarter of my pay check each month just replacing the the liquor I drink at work, so the guv’nor don’t get wise.   
I didn’t think it were Jams at first. When the number popped on me screen with the London area code I reckoned it was Ionee. About time, ya snooty cunt. Couldn’t wait to hear what she had to say. Chickens come home to roost now, innit? Almost wish she’d show up here, liven the joint up a bit, give the crusty old shitbags a show. Time they saw what a real war was like, make the fucking blitz look like child’s play, me and Ionee—having it out, oughter sell tickets to that to-do.  
I’d not fought anyone since I come back from Amsterdam, except for this one bloke who tried to take advantage, probably reckoned I’d feel flattered even a louse like him wanted to try it on with me on account of me hand. Well, I fucking showed him. Boot to the crotch . Yeah, I walked out of there feeling well chuffed, I owned that bastard, I’ll tell you. But that was it and it was over and I was still angry and sad too. Back in the day a fucking loser like that wouldn’ta even bothered trying to pull with me. He’d clock me from the across the room and know I was out of his league, way out, know I wouldn’t give a sorry sod like him the time of day. The fact that the slimes now think I’m at their level is too fucking depressing for words. Worse still, the fact that I was half thinking it might be worth it to get a shag in after all this time, even with the likes of him, sadder still.   
So now, when I feel like I want to fight someone, when that red mist starts descending, I go for a run. It’s great exercise and it’s socially acceptable. Doesn’t require two hands. It’s so fucking healthy, so fucking fun. People always say, oh are you practicing for the London Marathon then?  
Ah no, sunshine, I’m practicing for the day I finally get my shit together and off Ionee Israls good and proper and then have to run like hell from the filth.  
Let’s see what they say to that.  
So that’s what I do with me life. Run, work, drink and get hit on by losers. Oh and let’s not forget argue with me Mum and her waste of space boyfriend and see the docs for more pills.   
I don’t do church. Oh I believe in God, sure, believe he’s a sadistic fucking bastard, ain’t he? Bad enough I had to lose three fingers and half my palm off my left hand, but I can constantly feel them, even though they’re gone, itching me and I can’t scratch them because they’re not fucking there, innit? Never gave me any trouble while they were actually there, but now that they’re gone, it’s all I can feel sometimes. I mean, what the fuck? It doesn’t make any sense, but apparently it’s super common. Yeah, real intelligent design, that. Fucking torture is what it is. Every time you’re just going along with your life, doing your thing, not thinking ‘bout any of that old shit from the past, and there it goes, itching again, making you pay attention and you can’t ever fucking scratch it. Making sure you never fucking forget. What a bloody sick joke.   
And the reason for it? The cunt-headed reason for it? Ionee. Fuckin’ Ionee and don’t you forget it. If it wasn’t for her I’d still be getting the top drawer men, the ones who knew how to take care of me, buy me shit and take me on vacation, staying at all the nice hotels. Sometimes I just wish I just left Sy alone. Maybe then I wouldn’t’ve been in this pickle to begin with.   
But night after night after night after for all those years staring at his fit ass in those tight leather trousers from behind the drum kit. Sleeping all to one room in shitty hotels on the road, alone in the dark, pretending I didn’t hear the muffled moans escaping the darkest corner of the room, or see the shapes moving when the headlight of a car raked over the window, the shadows of the blinds curving over his toned bronze chest, as he reared up like a lion, arching his back as he thrust against her, aware, even if Ionee wasn’t, that he had an audience for sex. Oh, yeah he was aware. Once, I caught him look me in the eyes beneath the shadows and gimme a lusty wink. Or maybe I was dreaming. He was in my dreams all the time, too. Always teasing, just teasing me through the years and sleep was no escape. I dreamed of him, that we would connect eventually-- it was just so bloody inevitable.  
Just like this final showdown with Ionee. Inevitable. The ultimate face off. Mortal combat! City wins!  
Maybe she’d bring a knife or a gun or a flamethrower. Maybe she’d try to kill me. I was okay with that. If that’s how I go, so be it. Hail of bullets, knife to the throat. Just let it be fast and let it be through doing something. Not doddering and dribbling the last of me life away like these sad old cunts at the bar, wasting away in this shit-arse, second rate place. No fucking way, that won’t be me.   
So yeah, I was expecting Ionee, but it was Jams what called.  
“City?” His voice again, Clint Eastwood hoarse. What, did he have some kind of perma-laryngitis or something? Fucking get a lozenge man.   
“So it’s the Man with no Name, eh?”  
“It’s Jams and you know it, City.”  
“Uh-huh.”  
“Listen, you have any idea what you’ve done?”  
“No, no, I don’t,” I said, tracing some spilled beer on the bar into a smiley face with my finger. “Please, do tell, enliiiiiighten me, what happennnnned after I left,” I’m purring. This I wanted to savour. “Did dear little Ionee get her precious knickers in a knot?”  
“City,” he sighed, “Ionee just got outta hospital.”  
“What?”  
“I got out a few days ago meself.”  
“And why’s that then? The two a you share a bad curry or something?”  
“Ionee’s leg is poorly. Her ankle was so damaged they had to remove all the bone completely, replace the lot with artificial. I had a concussion, skull fracture.”   
“You fractured your skull? People can do that?”  
“Apparently. I’m getting better. It’s just loud noises now doing me head in, so please stop yelling, yeah?  
“Jeez, sorry. How’d it happen?” And then the obvious answer hit me and my stomach felt like it was falling, my lungs clenching tight so that I couldn’t breath for a second. “Were you guys in another car cr—“  
“No, there wasn’t another car crash.”  
My whole body relaxed.   
“If you must know, there was a row,” he went on. “A row you started, by saying that shit to Ocean. That’s why Irons was mad at me.”  
“Well, I don’t see what she was mad at you for,” I said defensively. “If she wanted to come after me then you shoulda just gave up me card.”  
“I didn’t want to give her your card City! Gah! How daft can you be! I was trying to protect you!”  
“Ta, but I don’t exactly need your protection, mate, been fending for meself long enough that—“  
“You didn’t see her, City. She went completely mental. I mean really mad, like I’ve never seen her before. Not even when you and Sy-- Anyway, you shouldn’t’ve fucked with Ocean. You don’t know Ionee the way I do. She’s very protective. You don’t know how she is about the crash, okay? You don’t know! She’s always blamed herself and she shouldn’t. It tears her up inside, I know it does and it’s not fair! It was just as much your fault and Sy’s and mine, too! Look, it was all of us! Not just her, innit?”  
“But she was the one driving.”  
“Only because the rest of us was too pissed to do it!”  
“She was the one driving.” Time he was reminded of the only fact that actually mattered. “Why she fly off the handle at you?”  
“She was angry because I didn’t stop you from leaving, because I didn’t actually know what you done until you scarpered out the flat like the police were after you, right after breakfast. Thanks for informing me by the way! Then Ionee found out what you told Ocean and got mad at me, because you weren’t there and then shit got physical.”   
“Oh come on! You’re taking the mick, Jams. There’s no way you and Ionee— Miss peace and love and shit-- mixing it up with you? Of all people!“  
“Believe what you want. I hope you’re happy. Couldn’t just leave bloody well enough alone could you?”   
“You didn’t have to put yourself in harm’s way protecting me! It were your choice, mate.”  
“Don’t mate me! You’re a bad person City,” Jams spat. “You really are.”   
“A bad person?” I laughed. “Is that the best you can do? What, no c-word from you these days? You’ve gone all PG-13 like you’re American?”   
“You’re a bad person, a cruel person. You just get off on stirring other people up, don’t care about the pain you cause. We had a good thing going here, but you couldn’t stand to see us happy, could you? You’ve always been a right jealous cunt.”  
“Jealous a’ what? That stupid little punk shop in the market? That two-bedroom above a chip shop? Ionee’s ragamuffin kid and her fucking Dr. Who obsession? Ionee better watch it, Ocean doesn’t turn out a lez the way she’s going.”   
“You shut up about Ocean and your fucking homophobic shite! You’d never understand what it means to be a parent, what Ionee has to do to take care of her daughter! Ocean is all she has! She’s all that’s left of Sy, you know that!”   
He was cutting me, even over the phone cutting into me like his words were knives, carving out me heart. Didn’t he realize? But still he goes on.  
“You’re just like before! You haven’t changed! Just have to go and ruin everything that’s good! That’s all you know how to do, destroy. Fuck with other people, wind ‘em up, try to bring ‘em down to your level.”  
I took a pull on a beer I hadn’t even realized I’d poured for meself, looking at it as if it just materialized in my hand.   
“I can see through you better than you can see yourself,” he ranted on. “I was there that night. I looked back through that review mirror and saw what you and Sy was up to, unclicking his seat belt so he could slide over the seats. So he could give you head, innit? So he could lick your fanny right there in the fooking car. You couldn’t wait! Why couldn’t you wait? I remember, even if Ionee don’t. You didn’t try to hide it. Out on the open road right there in front of everyone. And you blame her ‘cause she got distracted? Fucking unbelievable!”   
“He wasn’t her husband. They never was married. He didn’t belong to her.”   
“Fuck that. Fuck splitting hairs. You want to blame someone for your misfortune, piss orff and blame yourself. You ain’t getting my pity.”   
“You give the card to Ionee?”  
“No, for the billionth time no. I won’t give your card to her and as soon as I finish this call I’m deleting your number off my mobile and throwing this card with your address on it in the bin. How’s that? Because this cannot continue. We cannot stay in touch with you. Fuck old times’ sake. We’re done.”   
“C’mon Jams, what are you saying? We had good times back in—“   
“NO! I’m blocking you on every device I fucking own. Not me and not Ocean and not Ionee—you don’t talk to any’a us. We don’t want to see or hear from you. From now on we have our lives and you have yours and that’s it.”  
“Well, thanks for delivering the message boyo.”  
“Go fuck yourself City.”  
“With pleasure, arsehole!” I yelled and ended the call before Jams could have the satisfaction of hanging up on me.   
I stood there holding the phone for a second. So Jams was done with me for good and there’d be no duel in the sun with Ionee over the heart of precious little Ocean.   
Damnit.  
What would I do to keep meself entertained now?  
“Hey Jimmy!” I yelled to a bloke coming up to the bar outta the rain outside. Far too good looking for one of the regular punters, wearing a flash camera round his neck. DSLR by the likes of it. It looked dear. “Long time no see!”  
“Excuse me, do I know you? My name’s not Jimmy.”  
“Ah well, it could be…”


	27. Ionee: Career Opportunities

IONEE ISRALS  
(London, UK)

15\. CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

Without Jams to talk to, and Ocean all sulky around me, I grew starved for conversation. I don’t remember how it started, but I began talking to my youngest sister (half-sister if you wanna be technical), Cammy on the phone a lot. We always talked, and we was always friendly, but now it was different. We talked every day. We needed each other.  
In a way we were both just trying to survive after serious injury.   
Her friend died and her boyfriend split and she was trapped in a town without a job in sight, a city and country she’d never chosen to come to in the first place.   
I’d known them both a bit, Jonah and Mitch. They were cousins in fact, but more like brothers, since they only had sisters. After Jonah died, Mitch lit out for Vancouver and then finally LA. I think that’s what really stuck in Cammy’s craw, in the end of it, him living out the dream she introduced him to, the dream she had for herself of going to Hollywood, capitol of the entertainment industry and becoming a singing star. It wasn’t about talent in the end, it was just easier for Mitch to do, since he was a dual citizen through his Dad, though he’d never lived a day there in his life. And Cammy, who grew up in Buffalo and LA was stuck in Canada now.   
Not such a bad place to be stuck, Canada, as far as places go. If you’re some kind of oil engineer you’ve got it made. They’re not much for war and everybody just wants to stay chill and there’s free health care and the people aren’t gun nuts or anything.   
But it’s hard to make a living there for artists of any stripe. There’s no strong film or music or art or publishing industries really, not the way there are in the U.S. or even the UK. It’s always been so much easier and cheaper to just pick up the transmissions from across the border. Entertainment in Canada has always been mostly imported from over the border or across the ocean. You can be amazing at what you do, ready to join the big league over there, but then you learn there’s no big league to join, not if you stay in-country. So you’ve got a whole place of talented people just waiting for the call-up to the big show which hardly ever takes a look at ‘em, trying to survive on scraps in the meantime.  
When you think your life’s going to be like your parents’ life, in this world of limitless economic opportunity and travel, where you can live any place in the world, it’s a bitter pill, living in this little place that makes it clear in no uncertain terms that it doesn’t want or need someone of your talents.   
No one, least of all our parents ever actually realizing that some stupid, circumstantial thing, like the exact date they applied for her citizenship, could change a person’s future so dramatically, but then again I think she always assumed Mitch would marry her, and they’d go off to live in New York or California, make the film and music scenes, etcetra, etcetra.   
Mitch never even thought of it on his own, of leaving Canada. And then Cammy came along and infected him with her ambition and made him dream bigger than his own backyard. Left to his own devices, he would’ve been content to hang around T.O. and go into the family’s furniture business, put his music and film ambitions on the backburner for a sensible career.   
Cammy, with her experience of living other places, of seeing the world and all its wonders with Mum and Dad, of hearing from them that anything was possible for us kids, no dream was unattainable, helped open him up to the possibilities his parentage could bring him. And now he was there, living the dream he’d taken from her and she was still in Toronto, chafing against her prospects once again.   
What could I do, but listen? It wasn’t like I wanted to talk about my own problems anyway, boring as they were to me. Blah blah blah my ankle hurts, the shop is falling apart, oh, and Ocean hates me. I had to listen to that shite in my own head 24/7. I’d rather hear Cammy’s problems any day. At least it was a change of pace.   
But that’s not to say it didn’t saddened me to hear poor Cams, all the hope leaked out of her, who was such a cheerful child, all my dreams for her to be happy, shrinking in my mind.  
At least I felt buoyed up a bit, knowing she trusted me enough to talk to me, to tell me things she’d not told anyone else, because she wanted my advice, because she told me I understood her and I helped her. She rarely talked about Jonah, but I could hear it behind her words, her loss of him, dogging her life, making her question every choice and what it would lead to, doubting everything. Fuck yeah, I knew what living with guilt like that was like. If I could do nothing else in my current state, at least I could still comfort her. And curious enough, it comforted me too, because just when I felt completely useless, and unloved I realized, no, I wasn’t. Here was Cammy leaning on me, loving me, saying these nice things about me, helping me believe them myself.   
But it wasn’t all love and rainbows with me and Cammy. Sometimes she frightened me with the things she said. Sometimes she made me furious. How could I protect her, like I did when she was little? I remember turning up at her posh little Hebrew day school in T.O., the one she was at before my parents moved the family to LA.   
Rocking up to the playground, in my clunky boots, dog collar, Johnny Cash flipping someone the bird on my black T-shirt, approaching some little toffee nosed girl in a pink cardy and acid wash jeans with ruffles on the hem getting her to lay off my little sis. I’m not the best singer, but I got range. I can modulate my voice, go super high or do this down low gravelly voice when I wanted to. I turned on this posh little girl who thought she was all that and a bag of crisps and talked all deep and growly to her like Ray Winston on half a pack a’ fags: “Oi, so I hear you was bovvering me little sister at lunchtime…”  
Ha, that set the little cunt straight.  
Too bad I can’t do nothing for Cammy now. I can’t protect her when I’m so far away. Not from what Mitch and Jonah did to her, hurting her, leaving her all alone. How can I make her see that she doesn’t have to be lonely, that I’d take care of her if she just came to me? I don’t know how, can barely do for meself these days, but I would, I’d take care of her. Unfortunately, the one thing I can’t do is I can’t protect her from herself. See, I know she hurts herself and I kind of get it. There were times, in my parents house alone after the crash, recuperating, ruminating over all that happened, when I’d do anything to distract myself, to bury all that fucking gabbling of the guilt and hurt inside, to make it shut up, even just for a moment. A few times I pressed on the fixators, the metal that helped hold the metal and bone structure together as the bones fused back in place. When you pressed on them you could feel it hurt all the way down to the inside. It fucking tore me apart with pain, but at least it made all the thinking go away, all the blaming myself, even if for just a bit. It was only a few times I did it and those were dark dark days, the darkest in my life. But it was enough, I could understand what Cammy was doing, even when no one else could.   
Mum and Dad knew and she was going to a therapist. There were medications tried that did more harm than good, caused strange, neurological reactions that just made everything worse, until something was finally hit on one that seemed to do the trick, to take the edge off the despair, enough that I could see some of her old happy self again.   
But before that, there were nights I lay awake terrified. I remembered Jams in the hospital in New Orleans when he almost died. She talked to me on the phone about needing to do something to placate the darkness, feeling like she had to give a little bit of herself to it so it would leave her alone a bit, stop bugging her to give it the lot. It disturbed me to hear her talk that way. Sweating under the sheets with the effort, I would squeeze my eyes shut, tight tight tight and visualize in my mind—a pink transluscent tendril going out from my forehead, pouring all my love and care into it, watching it detach from myself, take wing and fly across the ocean, to wrap itself around her, wherever she was, this little pink shawl of warmth wrapping itself around her shoulders like a hug, swaddling her in layer after layer of my love and protection. Willing her to be all right, to get through it, to realize she was loved and so very important and so very much wanted and that this too would pass, to know she didn’t have to fight the sorrows of the world alone.   
And then one day, after talking off and on through a few years of shit employment prospects after her graduation from teacher’s college and trying to start a band and failing through lack of venues that payed more than “exposure” she said to me, quite conversationally one day—“Oh, Ionee, I’ve booked the ticket.”  
“Wot?”  
“What I’ve been talking to you for months. What? You think I was just saying it for kicks? That I want to come to London and see you? I’ve talked to Mum and Dad and they said it’s okay. I can come for real now! There’s this teaching agency, they’re looking for people and I thought I could try it out for a bit, see how it suits me, England, y’know? I mean nothing’s happening career wise around here, I’m still under 30 so I can qualify for a youth mobility scheme visa. Why not, eh? This friend of mine here did it. I got in touch with her by Facebook. Says it’s great. You think I can crash with you, at least for the beginning?”  
“What teaching agency? They’re offering you a gig? How long’re you thinking of staying?”  
“For good if I can help it.” Over Skype her face looked set and determined. “I hate this place. Time to blow this pop stand for good. I’ve decided. Took long enough, but I think I’m ready now with the new medicine. I’m strong enough again to try. I just got my passport with my finalized youth mob visa in the mail today. I can leave in two weeks.”  
“Youth mob?” Thoughts Malcolm Macdowell in Clockwork Orange.  
“It’s good for two years. I’ve signed on with a teaching agency as a day to day supply. Who knows, maybe if I’m good they’ll hire me on permenantly, give me leave to remain? Or maybe I’ll finally make it in the music biz out there. They have way more of that stuff out in London, right? You know everybody, as well. You can introduce me to people!”   
“Yeah, about that, my contacts here are pretty shot. The only thing I have going is a bit of session work and I haven’t done any a’ that for ages.”  
“Not since you broke your ankle, hmm?” said Cammy shrewdly and I wondered exactly how much of what was really going on she’d sussed out even if I’d not told her.  
I’d had to say something about it to them. I couldn’t keep it completely under wraps, so for proper parental consumption it had been a slight ankle fracture on my bad side, but nothing more. I didn’t need Mum freaking out about me when she had Bubie and Cammy to worry about. All I was probably missing out on was a serious telling off, and that I could do without.   
A year and a half since the operation and it was the longest time I’d ever gone without going across the pond with Ocean or having my folks visit us out here. Mum would’ve come if not for Bubie, but they were still saying she could go any day now and Mum wanted to be there.   
I’d never wanted to see them more than I did now. I positively yearned for it, so that some days I was nearly in tears over wishing I had a teleporter to send me over, just for a brief hug and face to face chat. It would’ve been easy if they were somewhere like Brighton or Edinburgh. As it was, the price of a ticket was ridiculous, not to mention the thought of sitting in some tiny space with my leg bent up—not appealing. Eventually, as time went by without me and Ocean making our usual visit they offered to pay half the ticket, then the full shot. I ached to go like my heart was stretched, but every time I gave some bullshit excuse. They knew Jams had quit the shop and I went on and on about not being able to get someone I trusted to take it on for a week or two. Like I could even afford to hire anyone to help me, much as I needed it.  
I knew, despite all my wishing, that I couldn’t go. All Mum had to do was take one proper look at me walking with my stick and she’d realize exactly what was going on. No hiding how much I’d fucked up then, messing up all the work done on my leg, everything they’d paid so much for, all that surgery and physio in private clinics just trying to put my sorry self put back together in some semblance of functional order. As if I was worth the trouble to begin with. All wasted in another moment of pure carelessness.   
She was a doctor! She’d have me pegged the moment I got through the arrival gates. Somehow or other I needed to get myself fixed up before they took it upon themselves to visit or send us tickets because of how long it had been since they’d seen Ocean and it was just terrible because I really did want to ask her what I should do about it. But now if I told them they’d be mad because I’d lied to them for so long about it. It was ridiculously complicated and my mind was spinning in circles on the subject. Luckily, I’d only told Ocean I’d broken the ankle, not that it was completely kaput and needed to be replaced or anything, ‘cause I didn’t want to freak her out. Only Jams and Aza really knew what was going on.  
I got Ocean to promise to remain stumm on the matter of her staying at Aza’s house for three days. It was not a new phenomenon, there were things she knew we weren’t supposed to talk about with Bubie and Zaidy, our little secrets-- such as knowing I had the occasionally spliff with Jams on the porch or letting her eat pork and beans from the tin for lunch or the time we spent the High Holidays at the Dr. Who Experience in Wales.   
Sy used to say that not telling the full truth if someone didn’t ask you wasn’t really a lie, but that’s crap if you ask me. There’s something called a lie of omission. Just because I never asked him, “Oh are you and City knocking boots now?” didn’t mean it wasn’t deception, him not telling me.   
I didn’t like doing it myself, hated it, lying like that. So why did I do it? Perhaps I just don’t like people fighting, especially when I’m the object of the argument, when they expect me to start yelling and confronting them back. I tend to avoid getting into the mix like that. I don’t trust myself when I’m angry – I mean you see why now-- it’s like being on a drug binge because you do and say things without thinking anything about the consequences. Angry people, it’s like they say things that’re the worse versions of themselves. And unlike a lot of people I remember what I see and hear. I remember forever, everything. Everything except that one crucial thing, that one moment in my life that I’d give anything to remember. Ironic innit?  
But hey, mustn’t get down, Irons.  
Cammy’s coming to London. Won’t Ocean be chuffed about that! Cammy’s coming to London! And at last things are going to change.


	28. VOLUME THREE: LIMELIGHT  Cammy: The Boxer

BOOK 3:  
LIMELIGHT:  
June 2015

 

 

 

 

 

CAMMY HALES  
(London, UK)

1\. THE BOXER 

 

I’ve been in London nearly a year now and waking up in Ionee’s room is still a trip. There’re CDs stacked Dr. Seuss-style, on nearly every available surface. This, even with the nearly new Ikea media shelf we found at that used-furniture “store” some shady dude runs out of the alley between the Blue Orchid Chinese takeout and Amir’s Unlock Ur Mobile down Willesden Lane.  
In one corner sits Ionee’s bat mitzvah present from Bubie, a gray Sony boombox, still sleek despite its age and the remains of old Sandylion stickers stuck around the speakers, the CD player, anachronistic double cassette deck and even anachronistic-ier mini-CD attachment functioning perfectly some twenty odd years and a gazillion moves across three countries later. It’s funny what survives.  
In the morning I read the CD titles on the shelf across my side of the bed, keeps me from thinking about last night’s freaky dreams. She’s got a lot of early 80s punk, ska and reggae in there, some New Wave, too. The bands she listens to don’t do a lot of love songs. I appreciate that, at the risk of sounding crude there may be fifty ways to leave your lover, but I don’t want to hear about them just now. Ionee says a love song’s nice, but when every song you hear’s all generic guy lusting after generic girl it gets pretty boring pretty fast.  
Punk songs, folk songs, I get them-- there’s a wider scope at play there, this whole world we’re living in with so much going on in it that shouldn’t be the way it is, that doesn’t do us humans any justice. There’s more to the story us than what you hear on the news, like if you just watched that and didn’t know any humans for real, all you’d think we’re good for is blowing ourselves up, crashing cars and sex assaults; not building cool things, caring for sick people, making art or raising kids.   
Plus, with punk and folk songs, the audience--They’re not just there to sit passive and listen. It’s music that invites you in to be a part of it, to try it yourself, to get out there and do something of your own, not to shut up, keep your head down, listen and spit back what you’re told.   
Dad’s music made you feel that, like you could have a voice and change things, like that was something you could do. It’s what we called all that folky/60s/70ssinger-songwriter/soul stuff he’d always been into, since way back when Yorkville was a hangout for hippies. Not easy to imagine for me. I mean now that area of T’rawno’s just completely morphed, all expensive shops, restaurants, hotels, Pusateri’s and Whole Foods groceries.   
Physically, the city may’ve changed beyond recognition, but Dad’s music’s still there, floating on the ether, mixed in with the concrete of all those late 60s and early 1970s buildings, enduring monuments to the unsuitability of concrete to the shitty climate; Concrete buildings that always looked so bleak mid-winter, gray towers under gray skies, trickles of grimy meltwater dripping off the window ledges streaking their faces with dark sooty tears, reminding me of some kind of disgracefully aging goth boy dripping eyeliner in the rain.   
At St. Clair West subway there was always this one busker outside the new Loblaws who sounded exactly like Murray McLaughlin. I used to stand staring at the orange tiles (what was it about the seventies that made people think orange, purple and brown made a good combination?) and listen to those same songs winding through the tunnels like the rooms of our house, Dad-music, taking me back to Buffalo, my orange toy dump truck driving through the beige shag carpet in the old house, humming along to the words I didn’t always understand. Still, I always liked those sorts of songs—the ones that go from mouth to mouth like kisses--songs that tell a story, that still have something to say years later.   
Ionee was always on the look out for new music that could do that particular trick. Which explained all the self-made CDs and USB sticks, demos mostly. Friends and other randos were always giving us their shit to push at the store. Some of it had the most god-awful production values imaginable, but occasionally you’d discern a spark of something in it; Others were slick as anything you heard on the radio, and sounded like every other song you heard on it, too; together they formed the very definition of a mixed bag, but Ionee felt it our responsibility to listen to the first song of each thing we got. It was an education, to say the least.  
“Music is music. Whether they’re famous or whatever, that’s bullshit. All famous means is someone knows someone, no more.”   
I thought there might be a little bit more, but Ionee, just said, “Keep an open mind, yeahr?” I guess she had a point.   
Aside from the folk and punk, a good share of the music real estate in Ionee’s room is taken up by 80s New Wave compilations. Mostly the good shit that reminds me of my early teenage years, permanently “borrowing” Shoshi’s Destination Dancefloor CDs, tuning in to Electric Circus on City TV, before Baby Blue, the evening soft porn segment. Chris Shepard’s Pirate Radio and the endless stream of Euro dance hits on 103.5, “best Gino Beats straight from Ibiza to your airwaves.” In LA you would only find that music in gay clubs, but in T’rawno it’s everywhere, especially Italian areas like Woodbridge, where Mitch lived near the Paparazzi club.  
Nowadays I tend to gravitate to 80s New Wave and Reggae stuff more than punk. I like that it’s lusher, with all those inventive electronic sounds, electronic. Not stuff you could easily learn yourself, or play alone, but deep and rich. Sometimes a stripped down sound just gets dull. Ionee might disagree, but there is only so much Clash you can listen to without craving something with a plusher vibe, that makes you get up and dance.  
Gimme some of those organs, KORGs, synthesizers and MOOGs! Hit me with some of that steel drum Island-style, music to fill the world with bright clothes, spacey robot sounds and ravers dancing fast all night long.   
Me and Ocean used to meet up with Jams on the sly from Ionee at Cyberdog, this shop that reaches deep down into the subterranean core of the Stables, the strange pulsing, t heart of the Market, beeping and booping to its own phosporescent trance rhythm.  
Like a lot of gay guys, Jams likes dance music or “Electronica” as he snobbily calls it. Like Ionee thinks comic books are “graphic novels,” c’mon. Back then the rave scene was the only one really upfront okay with gays and rainbows and aliens. “High on a happy vibe” or whatever. The rest was all Metallica, Grunge and this really misogynist rapper shit. Ecstasy made you feel love for everyone, this whole ‘we’re all just part of one big organism, what’s the point of prejudice’ kind of feeling-- like gay or straight, guy or girl it didn’t matter—you just end up hugging, kissing everybody. Maybe it helped dispel a little of that entrenched homophobia, who knows?   
Everybody used to be afraid of sex, then according to Jams. “Like if you were growing up in the 90s it was always AIDS this and AIDS that and don’t be gay, ‘cause sex’ll kill you. It was mostly gay guys and junkies you saw having it then. Result-- You thought for sure you’d get HIV the instant you even fancied a bloke and it’s like you’re doomed to either die a horrible death or lead a fuckless life for all eternity!”  
“Imagine you’re the only gay you know and you start thinking now your life’s rubbish and you’ll never never fit in anywhere, never find love, but then there’s Annie Lennox all dyked out in this orange brush cut and combat boots and Pete Shelley singing about being a ‘Homosapien’ and you know he was really talking about being homosexual and you know you’re not alone, yeah? And you think maybe people like that aren’t around you now, maybe they was famous a decade ago, but it don’t matter, you can you see a place you’d belong, if you could just wait it out, wait till you was old enough to escape. Just knowing that was out there, it made a difference, yeah? Plus, to be honest, the internet’s the best thing to happen to gays evah! I don’t think I even had a modem at home until I was in uni. Just think of all the good pornos I missed out on! Instead I had to make do with rewinding copies of James Bond tapes just to catch the one scene of Sean Connery or Roger Moore topless in a water scene. This was all pre-DVD, you understand?”  
“Yeah, I’m familiar with the concept of VCRs.”   
“But see? That’s the beau’y of today’s world you don’t have to see a thing yourself to know about it. Any information you want—it’s just out there. Any question you want answered, it’s there at your fingertips like magic. Now’days, people, they only got to remain ignorant by choice. No queer kid, long as he has the internet can ever think they’re the only one like them ever again!”   
I nodded. I know a bit about feeling excluded and alone. It’s like being dropped into Hebrew school in T’rawno into this class of kids together since junior kindergarten, in a place like Willy Wonka’s factory, where no one ever came and no one ever left-- at least not till I got there. I couldn’t fathom this upside down world where all the girls had to pray behind a screen, apparently so they couldn’t distract the boys with their feminine whiles at age eight. Personally, I was more likely to distract a boy showing him a giant nugget of “nose gold,” but that’s hardly down to my sex, now is it? I was the only kid in class who’d ever lived anywhere else, never mind it was just Buffalo; it still made me different enough to give some bored aspiring sadists something to do. Luckily, a few years after I arrived-- like aliens from outer space, a handful of subsidized Refusenik kids from the soon-to-be-former USSR appeared and I was happy to find some friends at last, but those first few years were kind of hard socially.   
]It shouldn’t aggravate me, especially this far down the line, but it did, it still did, their ignorance and the injustice of it all. The unquestioning superiority and respect the other kids endowed them with, based on what exactly? Even as a kid I could see the direct line to the Nazis in the Holocaust videos we watched for Yom Hashoah. of goose-stepping Nazi soldiers. Although truthfully, any day could be Holocaust Remberance Day if we could get one of the Hebrew teachers off on a tangent during Tanach class.   
It wasn’t just the other kids who made things difficult, I’m sure. Part of the difficulty, as always, was—is-- me. And now here I am, trying to be a lead singer in London, of all places. Should tell you enough what I’m like—the sort of person who craves attention. I suppose if I had a different sort of personality, like if I was the kind of kid who knew to keep her head down and her mouth shut, go along with the bullshit hierarchy-- But who’re we kidding? That shit’s boring and the only hierarchy I respect is based on musical skills and not being an asshole.   
People treat it like it’s some kind of great big hhate, this need to be noticed, (and just to clarify, that’s “hhate” meaning “sin” in Hebrew, with the weird H sound that sound you’re coughing up a hairball, not “hate,” being the feeling the Boomtown Rats got about Mondays in the 80s). So yeah, I want all eyes on me. So what, at least I’m honest about it. I know why I put myself in front of a class every day as a teacher and it’s not cause I enjoy being a dictator of my own kingdom of mini-people, or couldn’t figure out what to do with a degree in political science. The classroom’s my theatre, the front near the board’s my stage. Maybe I’m not up there singing, but a teacher always has a captive audience. They may not be a particularly engaged audience, but at least they’re there and I’m performing and it’s a distraction. I don’t think about Mitch or Jonah then, not like when I’m alone. Only when I’m singing or composing does it feel as good these days. Otherwise, you get me on my own and it’s like my brain’s just going round and round, this weird-ass dog gnawing its own tail to pieces just ‘cause there’s nothing else to chew on.   
I don’t know why I’m like this these days. Don’t think I’m not ashamed, I mean my parents gave me everything. I was never abused, thank God, and I’m not starving in a third world country or anything. Honestly, sometimes I look at myself in the mirror and it’s like What’s your fucking problem? You grew up with teachers who’d seen their entire families die, for fuck’s sake— You shouldn’t feel the way you do, not when you know others have it so much worse— You’re not allowed to feel so hopeless! Over what? Some stupid guy? Come on! Shouldn’t all these people, my family who love me be enough? I feel so so so guilty that I can’t do better by them. They deserve to be made proud, not to having to make excuses for me all the time, picking up the bill for the latest therapy or whatever, putting up with my tears and the pills and bullshit.   
But maybe it’s not that weird that it’s hard for me. To grow up like that-- with parents who love you so much, who’d do anything to give you the best—the most expensive education, the most love, every advantage, the highest standards of achievement to aspire to and you’ve worked hard and followed through (for the most part anyway) – and go into the world all filled up with talent and hope, marinated in their dreams and beliefs in the great things you will do, in the better world you’ll create for everyone—the art you’ll make, the diseases you’ll cure, the civil rights you’ll bring to everyone, the children you’ll raise. And then you get out in the adult world, trying to find a job, some place to belong and you run smack into all these systems--these big fucking automated structures: voicemails no human person ever listens to, online job applications that are just there for show, because they’re not really hiring, not unless you know someone, helpdesk FAQs that never answer your fucking question, music demos sucked into black holes from which no information escapes, all this struggle and effort and creativity gone where? Into what? Just absorbed by this vast technological wall other humans hide behind so the cowards never have to talk to you in person, or see the hurt in your eyes face to face at another rejection, or take any real responsibility for what they do to your life.   
The thing that hurts the most, that really eats away at your soul, is that you’re not even being rejected ‘cause you’re not good enough. That I could deal with, knowing what I needs improvement to get where I want to go, I could work the fuck outta that. But there’s just nothing-- no one human’s even listening. What do you do with that? No one needs what you have to give. No one’s looking at that dropbox full of demo mp3s cause the position’s already taken and they won’t even waste the resources of an unpaid intern to email you back a one line rejection.   
I guess, it’s hard to come to grips with your own irrelevance in the grand scheme of things at any age. Working in schools her in the UK I see all these parents’ going on about how their precious little didums is oh-so talented above all other children, and other teachers rolling thei reyes about what a load of horseshit that is. Me, I’m okay with it. I say worry for the kid whose parents don’t say that.   
You need someone on your side in this life. Thank your lucky stars if you’re a kid with parents like that, ‘cause no one else in the world’ll ever see you that way. No one else ever really has the time for one thing.   
It’s pure fictional bullshit—this notion of getting discovered. I’ve never seen it happen to anyone I know and the people I know are plenty talented. My guess is in real life you gotta scam your way into being seen at all. And even when they see it, even when they hear it, no one’ll go on record saying you’ve got it, unless everyone else they know confirms it, unless they know you’re a safe bet that they can categorize and market the fuck out of.   
When Ionee was younger than I am now, (now that’s a real trip thinking that), living outta Mum’s old van on the road with the Fuck-Ups, staying in hostels, taking these all these wacky day jobs, (she was a fish sexer at one point, seriously that is a job), getting kicked out by the cops for trying to busk in Trafalgar Square and telling me all these funny stories—I used to think it was all so exciting and romantic—like Lord Byron on the grand tour through Europe--a million light years away from Hebrew schoo life. Ionee wasn’t hidden behind a screen. She was out there in full fucking technicolour, tearing down the system seven days a week with sexy Sy there by her side! Walking the hypocritical halls, rocking the uncool uniform of white, long sleeve sniyut shirt and navy blue skirt below-the-knee in un-air conditioned June weather, I longed to be up there beside her, to be seen, to be free.   
She told me the summer I turned sixteen, she’d let me be a roady on tour with the Fuck-Ups, their first big American tour, up the coast of California. Mom and Dad were already planning to move back to LA so Dad could fulfill a short-term year long contract with the American Consulate, he was already consulting by that point and Mum could take her first sabbatical. I hadn’t exactly broken the news to them yet, but I was sure they’d be perfectly fine with it, (insert sarcastic cough here). I was on my way to where I was always meant to be at last, like that kid from my favourite Gordon Korman book, “Born to Rock.”  
And then things kind of went off the rails. The car crash and all the shit that came after, my parents having to take care of Ocean, and the move back T’rawno and Ionee leaving, abandoning me for London and the steady gig running the punk shop. And now she was this single parent drowning under a shitload of debt, with fucking arthritis at thirty-seven! Without NHS healthcare and the constant influx of cash from my parents she and Ocean would be out on the street or back living with them in T’rawno.   
“Which is why we still live here and not in America,” Ionee says. “That and free birth control.” Actually I know for a fact, it’s because American citizenship’s such a bitch to get. No wonder there’s so many illegal immigrants if it’s impossible to get in any other way. Trust me, I’ve tried. As for the free birth control, which they don’t even have in Canada, I won’t lie, yes, it’s fucking awesome.   
Ionee acts all flip and funny, but we’ve known each too long to hide anything. Like, honestly she thinks I don’t catch her staring out the window at breakfast listening to some new group on the DAB radio that’s not a patch on what she used to play. C’mon I can see your thoughts Ionic Bond like a printed out receipt at an ATM: My chance has passed me by. It passed me by, and I never even got a fair shot. How shite is that?   
Sometimes, (and I don’t tell her this), I worry I’ll be where she is in ten, fifteen years time, barely hanging on to the shitty apartment with the drippy ceilings and fish n’ chips smell, slowly going to fat as I top up the British Gas card ten quid at a time to keep from freezing when the space heater conks out. Me, holding up the line at ASDA trying to pay for a single item with five different credit cards, all declined, while my humiliated offspring darts behind the festive cake display.   
Except, it’ll be happening to me in Canada instead of here, which is seriously worse. For one thing, squatting when you can’t afford to rent an apartment, squatting’s out--climate reasons. For another, you can’t really make a living in the arts there these days, not unless you’re married to somebody with a “real job.” It’s like someone from North Bay becoming a professional surfer. There’s nothing about the thing that’s against the laws of physics—it’s completely possible. It’s just pretty fucking unlikely and it’s not just the lack of an ocean, there’s a complete history, a structure that’s missing or was taken apart long ago.   
In London there’s a context, a past to tap into with all the Muswell Hillbillies, Abbey Road Studios, Waterloo Sunsets, West End Girls. I mean come on, even Tesco’s the frickin’ grocery store chain gets name dropped in lyrics all the time.   
You’ve got company, even if it’s just the pissed off ghost of John Keats. Not so much living outta a self-storage unit in Scarborough or a basement in Brampton. And the T’rawno groups weren’t bad--far from it, I saw some of the best bands I ever did in T’rawno. It’s just once you got proficient, there was nowhere higher to go, no big record company to snap you up, or TV show to star on. Bands you’d see playing the pub circuit in T’rawno ten years ago’re still doing it years and years later, assuming they’re still together. There’s just nowhere else to play unless you’ve got some industry connection in the States or UK you can get interested. Eventually, your group keeps circulating at that level til it dissolves under the pressure of debt, day jobs and moves to cheaper places to live.  
I get it, why they wouldn’t want to sign my old band—“an original sound” doesn’t make a difference when none of us were dual and they’d have to wait a billion years for our visas to go through and pay for lawyers and all that other bullshit. (Under the table cash gigs in Niagara Falls border bars and playing for “exposure” at the Syracuse University student union, apparently aren’t legit, who knew?). It’s not like they aren’t already tripping over bands in New York, LA and London desperate for a chance and ready to go as is.   
All those years of seeing other people flame out, all I thought was they just didn’t have the guts and passion to stick to it. All these forty-something failed rock stars I used to meet on the circuit, gone all bitter and spiteful, envious of anyone else with a little hope and energy, just sitting around watching other bands on stage, taking the piss outta them. Not that I ever want to be like that, not around other people anyway, killing everyone’s buzz-- but like I do sort of get it now.   
Still, I don’t think it’s impossible. I mean there’ll always be exceptions, right? There’s Rush, right? —okay, so the industry’s changed since then, all the medium sized independent companies folded or taken over by American mega-corporations—but not here in London, not yet right? I just got to try this new angle, stead of just staying back home trying to break through a gate that closed ages ago.  
In therapy they always say “look at things differently,” like your life was this Rubik’s cube you could easily rotate to see another side of things. Look at what you’ve learned, instead of just thinking it’s another waste of time failure.   
But whatever lesson this is, fuck it, I’m not learning it. Let the universe teach someone else how to “Manage their expectations” which was something else they were big into in therapy. Forget all the great things your parents hoped you’d do with your life, all the potential you know you possess inside, kill that burning desire to participate, to make this planet the awesome place kids like Ocean deserve to inherit—forget that—just be satisfied you’re safe and alive.  
Which is important, but you know, still--  
On the wall above my bed is the single for “the Boxer,” Simon and Garfunkel in one of those album frame things, Ionee gets in bulk from Rough Trade. Always something about that song that got into my head and wouldn’t get out, lie la lie, even as a kid, back when I thought the song was about a boxer tree, like the ones that made the weird fruit teachers would bring back from Israel.   
My references were messed up, but still, I kind of got it—like if you can carry the scars of every glove this world ever cut you down with, if you can cry with anger and shame and still say “fuck it” and get back up and get on with your shit, without lying down for good and you’re still out there, in their faces, pursuing whatever art you’re into, then maybe, you’re doing pretty good. Even if it doesn’t look that way to anyone else.   
So, like I tell myself every morning “don’t be frightened.” Just get out, there, tackle this day with an open heart, don’t hold anything back.   
Sometimes, I fancy, (yeah, I can use that word now that I’m trying to be British), that Ionee, she’s like the guy singing, “I am leaving I am leaving” after everything that’s happened. That’s her giving up on music after Sy’s death, leaving her dreams for the practical business of running a shop. Me, I’m “the fighter still remains,” still trying to make a go of it for botha us.   
Or maybe I’ve got it the wrong way round and I’m the one who gives up, clears outta London in the end, back home to Canada, still too weak to make it on my own and she’s the one still here, still fighting to live her life the way she wants to, independent of the family back home, whether she makes it in music or not.   
Confusing. I wish there was some kind map for this, someone or something to follow to get where you want to go. But I tell myself, enda the day, all that matters is endurance, not talent, just staying power, being the one who won’t give up, who can hold that note the longest. Not like I could actually quit music now anyway, too late for that-- it’s part of me, I need to create like I need oxygen to feed my soul, natural and unconscious and necessary as breathing.   
But these mornings, with the drowsiness from the medication and the memories all pulling at me, trying to suck me back down into the old swamp of shoulda-coulda-woulda thoughts it’s hard not to stay paralyzed, knowing whatever I try my hand at… I’m just going to fuck it up anyway. Inertia taking over and you wonder what’s the point even getting up, going to another supply gig at stupid o’clock in the morning that won’t materialize into the permanent job you so desperately need to remain here in the UK after your visa is done. I miss Mum and Dad so much it almost hurts. Much as I love Ionee, she’s not them.  
When I start feeling like that I godda remind myself again why I’m here-- because there’s no chance for success back home, no job, no purpose, no going back until I’ve won this thing. And I will win, because I’m not alone-- Ionee’s got my back, just like I got her’s.   
Plus, if I ever get anywhere, even I havta drag her stubborn ass kicking and screaming, she will be coming along with me for the ride—cause this was her dream before it was mine.


	29. Ocean: Baby, Baby Oh

OCEAN ISRALS  
(London, UK)

1\. “Baby, baby oh.”

The girls at school, they was at it again, making up daft dances to put on the internet so they can become YouTube sensations and get on Britain’s Got Talent.   
“Ocean, why don’t you go and play with them?” asked Mrs. Oberika. “Why you always lurking out there by dah fence? Come away from der. You know the teachahs can’t see you over der.”  
I looked up at her all embarrassed. “I don’t want to play that. It’s a stupid.”  
“Oh,” her mouth went sideways. Pro’ly not what I was s’pposed to say. “You just wanna stand der by de fence poking at the shrubs den?”   
“No.”  
I walked away from the fence. There was a puddle in the middle of the playground, not muddy at all. You could see the school and the trees and the climbing frame and everything reflected on the other side.   
I could see another Ocean looking back at me. I imagined she was having fun at school with all her millions of friends. She plays in a band and everybody loves that Ocean, her. Other Ocean isn’t lonely. Sometimes I think if I try really hard maybe I can wish myself into the reflection world. I close my eyes proper tight, but those other girls and their rubbish singing, means I can’t concentrate.   
Daft girls, they don’t got no clue about forming a real band. They’re always trying to look like proper grown up birds, stretching out their school uniform so it goes down one shoulder to look sexy and show off the bra straps on their silly little teensy bras. Most of them don’t even have boobs. They stick pictures of One Direction on their notebooks and say they want to marry them, but Maryam didn’t even know what sex was until I explained it to her, so how could she get married to them and even then she call me a liah, so like whatevah. These girls, they don’t even care Justin Beiber don’t write his own music, not that it’d be that hard, I mean it’s just “Baby Baby Bay Oh.” I could write that and I can’t barely doing my spellings at grade level.   
But I’m not sturpid, okay? They’re the stupid ones. They don’t know anything about Britain’s Got Talent anyway. They say they’re fans, but they never try to get on the program for real. Its all just pretend. They don’t know nuffink about the process in real life at all.  
I know. I know because this one time Mum tried to get on the program. Wivout telling me she didn’t go to the shop this one day. Instead she took the DLR all the way to the ExCel Centre with her guitar on her back. It took a long time, over an hour and there were lots of transfers and going up and downstairs and then finally she got to the ExCel Centre and there were loads and loads of people in the queue. She stood and she stood some more and it was hours and hours of standing in the queue, until she just had to sit down, she was that knackered. So then she sat on the floor on her guitar case so her audition outfit wouldn’t get dirty and scooted along on her bum and the line moved and she got up again and sat down again and up and down and up and down as the line moved along and then finally, when it was she was twenty-three people away from getting in front of the first round of try-out judges she looked at her watch and realized she’d only have an hour to pick me up from aftercare at school and had to scarper.   
As it was she was half an hour past pick-up time and had to pay a penalty charge to the after-care people. They was well grumpy, I could tell.   
I wasn’t grumpy, instead I went kind of men’al. I started crying and got what Melanie, the aftercare lady, called “hysterical” which is a rubbish sexism word Mum tole me later—anyway, I just kind of started crying and couldn’t stop, I was that scared. It was stupid, I know, okay? Everyone looking at me and I could tell you they was thinking “Oh, that Ocean, what a drama queen, thinks she’s well hard don’t she, but lookit her carrying on like a baby, ha ha!” Don’t ask me why I just, I couldn’t stop thinking like maybe Mum died like what if she got run over by a lorry or in a transit accident or I don’t know what, but I couldn’t say, because I was thinking in me head if I said it out loud it might happen and I had to stay schtum about it or Mum would nevah come back!   
I was very very very very ultra- cross with Mum. She made me cry and look like a baby in front of everyone, so what’s she expect? She should tell me if she wants to do stuff, insteadah keeping secrets. I could be there with her, helping, like I could get her a chair or somefing if her foot was poorly or hold the guitar a while. It wasn’t roight, to stuff me away at school like that, not being told nuffink like some sturpid lickle kid. I thought we wasn’t like that, me and my Mum.   
We took a minicab home, because Mum said she just couldn’t go any further walking and I said “serves you bloody roight.” At home I cried in the toilet and Mum knocked on the door and I tole her “Go away” and she said she had to do a pee so I had to let her in. I said “fine” but I didn’t leave, I just stood in the tub until she was done and left and then when she tried to take my arm to get me to come too, I pushed her away. For a second I panicked, thinking she’d fall again like before, that bad time when she broke her leg, but she just grabbed the sink and glared at me so hard I got a proper fright, like maybe she was going to do something really really bad to me and I knew she were thinking it, but then she just walks out and slams the door and I heard her stupid limp limp limp steps going down the hall, into the living room.   
All night and all the next day too, she lay there on the couch in the living room with a loads of icepacks and these “magic magnet” bags on her ankle which Baba Bubie-- she says have “zero therapeutic benefits” and are just witch doctor stuff.   
I went to school the next day and no one played with me again and I got marked down in class again for tarking out of turn cause maths was boring.  
I don’t watch Britain’s Got Talent or Pop idol anymore which I guess makes me a weido. Look, I don’t want to be normal if it means being a sturpid idiot in’erested in stupid stuff. Still, I think it’d be cool, like having a real friend my own age who liked the stuff I like.   
Dream on, yeahr?


	30. Ocean: Timebomb

3\. “Black coat, white shoes, black hat, Cadillac! The boy’s a timebomb!”

Mum was at PT and me and Aunt Cammy was chilling at the shop the day we first met Darren Walls. I’d my little table in the back where I do my extra maths and reading that Aunt Cammy was working on with me. School Council pays Aunt Cammy for it, remedial tuition scheme and that, so Mum don’t have to spend more money on it. I like it better, doing it this way, ‘stead of getting taked out of class in school.   
I fooking hated that. Like they think I won’t suss out why it’s me and those two kids from behavioural in the group. Plus, Sonja the TA has it in for me, evah since I acciden’ally jumped on this juice box on the playground trying to make it go pop—look, I thought it was empty, it weren’t my fault, but it there it went, all ovah her posh handbag, and I know she never forgot it.  
It’s different with Aunt Cammy. There’s no Hamid pulling down his pants to show get everyone to laugh at his bare bum for one thing and so far I’m doing good, like Aunt Cammy says I prolly won’t need summer school if I keep this up.   
If I don’t havta go to summer school I hope I get to do to this Puppet Theatre Camp they run down the Locks in the summer. It’s like this old barge and you have to be in Key Stage 2 for them to trust you wiv the puppet stuff and now I’m old enough at last! I told Liam at school and him say puppets is gay, but I don’t care and anyway, nuffing wrong with being gay, he only says so ‘cause he’s ignorant, innit? says Uncle Jams. Anyways, when I’m oldah I’m gonnah have my own space themed musical puppet show on CBBC like Blue Peter, but bettah! Anyway, I’m glad if I don’t have to go to summer school because it’s in the “middle of flaminging nowhere” Mum said last year and bloody hard for us to get to, especially back when Mum’s leg was poorly. It’s loads better since she started going back to PT though. She hardly ever uses her eightball walking stick nowadays, only for long journeys and getting seats on the tube.  
It’s weird to think that Aunt Cammy’s a teacher like Mrs. Oberika. She’s not bossy at all at home. I think that’s why I learn better with her; she don’t act like she’s all better and smarter than me just cause she’s older. Plus, it’s hard to imagine her yelling at kids “Be sensible in the queue” or telling them they’re late or messy. She’s never on time to relieve Mum at the shop, or does a proper washing-up in the kitchen either and her stuff gets left all over the flat. Mum says “it’s like the Borg from Start Trek, going through our poor flat assimilating everything in sight,” but she says the exact same thing about my stuff, so it’s cool like Aunt Cammy’s my older sister and not me aunt. She looks way younger than Mum, as well, but maybe only cause Mum’s a bit podgy ‘round the middle and Aunt Cammy’s built more taller and slim.   
Sometimes, when Mum really flips shit about the mess, it ends with me and Aunt Cammy tidying up togetha and I just look at her and she looks at me and we just start in laughing. Mum goes absolutely men’al which just makes us laugh harder.   
Mum didn’t tell me this, but I think maybe Aunt Cammy never had a proper job with people that don’t know Bubie or Zadie because people at the schools she works at always get cross with her when she’s late and she should know that, I mean they’re always cross with me and I’m not even a teachah! Not that I’d be boverred I was her boss and Mum’s usually not too shirty about it, ‘cause she knows she’s not doing it to be rude. I’m always late meself for school pecause Aunt Cammy takes us to Greggs for sausage rolls or Claire’s to look at hair slides, so it’s not my fault, but stupid grown-ups at school don’t understand that we’re just not the on-time sort of people.   
Other things that make Aunt Cammy not a real grown-up? She don’t seem to care about pulling blokes. Serious! Jasmine at school says Cammy oughtter be pulling blokes like no tomorrow wiv a fit body like that, so there’s “clearly something wrong wiv her.” Jasmine knows loads of this so’tah stuff because of her older brother Ethan. His profile, right? He put it up on this dating site like he’s a proper grown up, but he’s only in secondary really and now he’s got all these fit birds going out wiv him taking him clubbing. I told Aunt Cammy, I told her if a bellend like him can do it, why can’t she put herself on one of them sites and get a boyfriend? But she tole me she don’t want one right now and we had to do more Marvelous Maths, which aren’t that marvelous really, but actually quite boring.  
When I asked Mum about it when Aunt Cammy was on a supply gig, she said Aunt Cammy’s still heartbroken over Mitch and Jonah, which don’t make sense cause Mum says Cammy never hooked up with Jonah even though he fancied her. Was that why he topped hisself? I wanted to know, but it’s not like you can say, because, me I’m not sposed to know.   
Mum says my dad also broke her heart, but she still goes out on the pull, even if I wish she didn’t. When I asked her when my dad broke her heart—like was it when he y’know died and stuff and she just looked at me and said “and before.” Which don’t make sense, like what’d he do to her before, like trash all her stuff or some’ing? But she just says “I’m not getting into it.” At any rate, Mum, she says she’s technically still on the pull, only she says guys interested in her, they’re never the ones she fancies and guys she fancies never fancy her back, so like what’s the use “side from storing up material for future wanking.” I asked her “what is wanking?” and Mum said that’s when grown-ups touch themselves down there and it’s opposed to feel good or something. And I said, “good like how?” And she said “like when you sit on the bubble thingy in the hot tub at the community pool.” And I said “You can sit on the bubble thingy?” And she said, “Ocean forget it.”   
Like I said, grown-ups’re weird.   
Plenty a geezers come intah the shop sniffing round Aunt Cammy, all looking like complete tossers to me, but I guess it makes sense, she’s young and fit, has nice clothes and a cool accent. Like they’re so obvious even I can tell, but either she don’t notice or maybe she just ignores them ‘cause she cares more about working on maths with me, which she should cause it’s more important ‘cause I’m her family and boys are stupid anyways except for Uncle Jams.  
Once I heard Aunt Cammy tell Mum how Bubie convinced her to go on J-date back in Canader because if she ever wants to have a kid she got to start working on it before she’s 35 because after that your eggs start to go bad and by forty you won’t have any left anyway, that’s wot Bubie said. She’s on Mum’s case too now and then, mostly about meeting a Jewish guy and to settle down and have more small fry before it’s too late, but Mum just says “My ship’s sailed, give it up” and then Bubie says “You’re a beautiful girl-- If you just took a little more care with your appearance…” which makes Mum do a fake laugh and change the subject and then they have the same conversation the next week. Sometimes I think it’s bettah being a chap, then you don’t have people bovvering you ‘bout rubbish twenty-four seven.   
So anyways Aunt Cammy goes to Mum, she goes:   
“So I went out on a date and it was just weird. I mean I’d be sitting out there with some guy at a café and I’d realize me and Mitch ate there once, because there’s only so many good date places back in T.O. and then I wouldn’t be seeing the guy at all in front of me, just Mitch and I’d be talking to this new guy and alla time I’m thinking, ‘it’s not right it’s not the same!” Meanwhile I’m carrying on this conversation on autopilot and all I can feel is the shallowness of all that getting to know you bullshit, like how this fucking stranger doesn’t know any of our codewords or in-jokes— eight years of private language and all these past situations we got into-- None of it means anything! I just can’t—I don’t know how to have a normal ‘date’ conversation anymore! All I ever do in my head is compare it to those three hour a talks on the phone me and Mitch used to have all the time and sitting in the driveway of his house looking at the stars talking about life the universe and everything, all that really deep shit. So then I’m staring at this guy across from me and it all seems so thin and I feel so guilty, dragging this poor shmo out, making him pay for my coffee and all the time, I know he’s got no chance, I can’t give him anything, he’s competing with a ghost, but worse than a ghost, because Mitch isn’t dead, it’s just he doesn’t want me anymore. So I go home just depressed and missing him worse than before wondering if I’ll ever be able to have a normal relationship, without all the memories drowning me, crowding out every other thought in my head. And then Mum’s all like, ‘How’d the date go?’ and I just put my head on her shoulder and cry. And I think she understands, right? But then a week later it’s like ‘oh my friend at work has a son, he’s at U of T studying blah-blah’ and I’m all like ‘NO!’ And she says how will I ever forget him if I don’t try to meet someone new, and I know she’s right, I mean ultimately, she’s right, but I just can’t, I don’t have it in me anymore. Like I’m this dried up desert inside, just, just-- empty, y’know? Like there’s nothing— there’s just nothing and I just don’t— I don’t-- I don’t know-- if it’ll ever come baaaaack!”  
By this point Aunt Cammy was just opened mouthed and wailing which was dead uncomfortable for me because at first I fought it was fake, because grown-ups aren’t supposed to cry like that, but it was real. Then I just got embarrassed for her, because she looked like some reception kid wot fell off the baby slide.  
Mum just nodded and said, “Look if anyone knows about people pressuring you to be normal…trust me, you won’t getting any of that from this end, alright? I’ll keep Mum and Dad out your hair, you keep ‘em outtah mine, okay? Anyway, they won’t bug you so much about it now that they’re not seeing you on a regular basis. Out of sight out of mind, innit?”  
“I dunno. I mean I love them! I don’t want to hurt them. You know they’re sensitive about these things. I don’t want them to feel like I’m ditching them, they’re still my favourite people in the world! Ohmygod, what if they completely forget about me?”  
“Now that’s truly ridiculous. They’re still getting your credit card statements in the mail, innit?”   
“Just the Master Card!”  
“Just?”   
“And okay, maybe one of the visas cards. And that Amazon points one. And the Walmart one, but I paid that back so—“  
“Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about it.” 

So that’s how it was for nearly a year, with Bubie and Zaydie paying for two of Aunt Cammy’s credit cards which buy all my books and school stuff, (yay for notebooks and pens from Ryman’s instead of crap ones from the pound shop!) and Mum keeping ‘em off her back about dating.   
Then this guy, he walks into Mum’s shop, cool looking real dark skinned black guy, with a flat minicab driver’s cap on his head, clothes and shoes like those chaps on the Specials album, all black and white and black and white check and very flash and it’s like boom, y’know?  
“Love the creepers, mate,” Aunt Cammy says and I file it away, so I know that’s wot they’re called, so I can ask for some for my birthday.   
Aunt Cammy likes to chat up the punters now and again when she gets bored, but sometimes they get The Wrong Idea, which means, they think she’s on the pull for them, when really she’s not. Typical grown-ups, wasting time on rubbish.   
He laughed, maybe because she sounded funny when she said “mate” with that North America accent. He had a nice laugh, deep and mellow.  
“Where’d you get ‘em?”   
She’s asking him this and I swear she’s like doing that thing with her eyes, y’know what I’m talking about, like half open eyelids or something funky with her eyelashes. I sincerely hope she don’t fancy him. Because she CANNOT fall in love right here, right now, and seriously, we got to finish our maths, we only have two more problems left and I don’t want to do them on me own!  
I try to tell her that she’s got to focus on what’s important here: “Um, can we finish the problem set now—like before I forget how to do long division again?” But she sort of waves me off from behind the counter where the man can’t see, still tarking about the bloody shoes, totally forgetting my existence and that is just not ON.   
“Darkside, innit?”   
That is SO unfair. I wanted to get goth shoes at the Darkside shop for back-to-school, but Mum said they’re overpriced and not practical made me get shitty plimsols from Primark, just because SHE can’t wear shoes from there she got to spoil it for everyone, innit?  
“You looking for anything in particular?” Aunt Cammy says and leans a bit over the counter—a move which I know FOR A FACT let’s the punters see the tops of her boobs.   
“Yeah, actually, this guitarist—Ileen or some’ing-- you know her from the Fuck-Ups, she still work here?”  
“You mean Ionee?”  
“Yeah, that’s it, sorry it’s that ‘C’mon Ileen’ song playing just a second ago mucking with my memory.”  
“She owns the place. I’m just her sister.”   
“Blimey! Never knew she’d an American sister.”  
“Canadian actually.”  
“Oh, heh, sorry.”  
“S’okay, we have an American sister too.”  
“Bet she’s not fit as you though.”  
“Ha, ha, thanks, but I haven’t had time to work out in ages. They have this fantastic sports complex near our place, but honestly it’s just a little too intimidating.”  
Why the bloody hell she telling him this stuff? Does she seriously not know what fit really means.  
“They have this really great place on Albert Street just by the market you know? I go there all the time. There’s this juice bar and…”   
BLEH! Grown-ups can be so annoying. All they ever think about is getting in each other’s pants and how much things cost and going to juice bars. God, I am so glad I’m not a grown-up woman! It’s like once you get boobies and a period you’re supposed to be into “bikini body secrets” and “Who Wore it Better- Royal Edition” instead of shit that matters. SUPER-BLEH!  
I waved my maths sheet at Aunt Cammy, but I couldn’t even catch her eye.   
“You know when she’s getting back, Ionee?” the man asked.   
“So who’s this then?” I asked the invasive species. “What’d you need my mum for anyway?”  
“Ocean, that’s a bit rude—“  
“Nah, nah, it’s not, really. I remember you from back when you was li’kl. Here, you can take my card.”  
I looked at it, but as usual the letters got all jumbly.   
“Darren Walls,” read Aunt Cammy over my shoulder.   
“That’s it,” he said, eyes closed with a smile. “I book acts for clubs. You remember Carbine?”   
I remember Carbine. Mum was only with them for six months a few years ago, I think, she says they finally cured her of “the band habit ha ha ha.” Mum was the only girl in a band with these three geezers; Matt, Luke and Dave, and they was all younger and always showing up high or drunk (I didn’t twig to it at first, but then Jams told me wot they smelled like), to practice, or not showing at all. Event’chly we found out Dave or maybe Luke, cause they’re cousins— anyway, whoever, they was nicking stuff from our place. Uncle Jams twigged to it after he caught Matt flogging his green velvet limited edition Doc Martins with the ribbon laces in Brick Lane for a tenner. Later Mum found out Dave teefed a load of blister packs of tablets from her jacket and he was exiled from Parklife and the F.U. shop forever. Bloody well right, too. If this one’s friends with them, we don’t want him round ‘ere.   
“That bunch of bellends?” I said, trying to be as fierce as possible. “What’d you have to do with ‘em?” He sort of did a step back. Didn’t expect me to know shit about Mum’s business, did he?  
“Nothing, only I booked the group for my mate, he used to run the Orange Room in Clapham Junction and now he’s got this other place and we need a band on short notice. I looked through my contacts and your Mum’s name came up. Well, Luke and Dave’s did too, but their mobiles’re no longer in service and Matt’s apparently working for Baskin Robbins in Ghana or some’ing. So, uh, she wit a new group now? ? Or maybe she know someone worth booking? We’d this group booked to open for our headliners at the Balham and their singer got arrested, so now they got to to pull out. We always go with a local for the opener if we’ve got an act from outtah town headlining. I got no one local to tap right now, everybody’s up at Glastonbury this week or that other festival down in Spain or the one in Holland or wot. I reckon if anyone could help me out finding a replacement, it’d be your mum. I need to find another group that’s kind of punk, but not too hard core, you know, to match the headliners. No metal shouty rubbish and definitely not some twee country music wannabes like those Mumford twats, okay?”  
“Sure, yeah,” said Aunt Cammy, though I think she maybe had a song or two by “those Mumfred twats” in her ipod.   
“In fact,” he said, clearly checking her out in the red polka-dot dress she called the “retro-50s special,” that made her boobs look big and pushed together. “I was thinking, y’know, of maybe going in a slightly different direction. Maybe someone, I dunno, with a bit of a classy, retro sort of sexiness, like sort of Amy Winehouse before she got all messed with the drugs or like—the B52s, you know them?”  
Actually, we both love the B52s, especially the “Rock Lobster” song, Mum used to sing it to me in the tub and I’d go under the water for the “down-down-down” part.   
“But like with a punky backing band. Someone with some soul, but a li’le edge to her, innit? I bet you’d be great fron’ing a band like that. You don’t happen to sing at all, eh luv?”   
I looked at Aunt Cammy, staring at him, and like you could see the gears going whizz whizz, whirrrrrrr in that crazy brainbox of hers, like you could almost hear it, her putting this cunny plan together in her mind. One second we was just a bunch of relations, sharing a flat, working at the shop, jamming together now and then and the next…  
“Yeah, Ionee’s got this new band, that just got together. I’m the lead singer.”  
I’m sorry-- What the fuck?   
“Really?”   
“Mum never said—“  
But Aunt Cammy just put her hand on my shoulder nice and firm, like shaddup and don’t argue. “Ocean’s in it too. It’s a family band. Sorta like Wings.”  
“Like Wings?”  
“That’s just an example, uh, we’re way, way more hard core.”  
About the only thing hard core about Aunt Cammy are those sweets she keeps buying at the pick n’ mix.   
“Brilliant. What gigs have you played?”  
“Just, just y’know, like really small local stuff, like private functions. Ionee wants to sort of slowly ease Ocean into preforming, ‘cause she’s still so young, you know?” She ruffled my hair. I pushed her hand away so I didn’t get the frizzies and she laughed nervously. “She’s still in regular school, too so we don’t want to get her overwhelmed, and uh detract from her studies. At least not until we can get her into a solid creative arts specialty sixth form college that allows for such things?”  
Specialty sixth form what? Creative arts SCHOOL? That exists? What da fuq’m I wasting my time at crap ass Harlesden Primary then? Art School? YES PLEASE! I am so into being in this frickin’ non-existant band from some alternate universe where my life is actually cool I can’t fooking stan’ it! Especially if we get to play a real gig in front of real people! I have been ready for this, like my WHOLE ENTIRE LIFE! But I just look down, play it cool, roight. This shit happens every day in the life of Ocean Israls Gupta, world’s most awesome guitar player.  
“Brilliant. That’s a huge load off my shoulders, I don’t mind telling you. Gig’s Saturday. You alright with that? Or do you want to discuss it with your sistah?”  
“Saturday? You mean this Saturday?”   
“Yeah, half past eight.” He took a business card for the shop from the counter where they were getting all dusty in their guitar-shaped holder. “This your email?” He pointed to the small writing on the business card that said ‘the F.U. Shop: Proud Merchants of Punk and Post-Punk Gear, CDs and Memorabilia’ on the top.   
“Better give you my personal one,” she said and scribbled it on the back. “It’s more reliable. Ionee almost never checks the one for the store.”  
“What’re you doing? He might be a stalker!” I was trying to whisper, but I stink at whispering and he clearly heard every word and started to chuckle.  
“Ocean!” hissed Aunt Cammy.  
“I’m not a starker.”  
“Sorry about her.” As if I was some dog trying to hump a guest’s leg or something—sheesh.  
“Nah, nah it’s cool. I’ll send you the rest of the details, okay? It’s not a hundred percent certain yet, I still have to check with the lads at the venue, make sure they’re okay with it. Usually they’d want to hear you play first, but we don’t have the time. I’ve heard Ionee from before and if you’re a pro like she is, shouldn’t be a problem. It’s just a short set anyway.”  
“Oh yeah, we’ve done loads of those,” she replied with a completely straight face.  
“So Saturday. Yeah.” And they shook hands, with him hanging on for just a little too long than completely necessary and Aunt Cammy just staring into his brown eyes with this stupid frozen smile plastered all over her face.   
He left, but turned just as he opened the door. I thought it a complete cert that he was ready to call us on our bullshit, but all he said was:  
“Oh I’m such an idjit. Forgot to ax, what’s the band’s name?”  
“Uh, the—uh—“  
Oh shit, Aunt Cammy was going to blow this for all of us! Panicking, I glanced around desperate for inspiration. I saw a record cover on the wall. There was a price tag over the first word in the group’s name, but I could still see the rest…he wouldn’t know, we could change the name later… he just needed something, anything, NOW… “Cammy and the Coffee Cats.”  
“Cammy and the Coffee Cats!” he laughed. “Perfect.”


	31. Cammy:  Sisters are doing it for Themselves

CAMMY HALES  
(London, UK)

4\. SISTERS ARE DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES

 

The shop door jingled. I held my tongue and counted. One Mississipi, Two Missisipi, three Missa—ah fuck he had to be far enough away by now!

“Cammy and the Coffee Cats? What the fuck? Where’d that name come from?”

She waved toward the record in their plastic wraps and price stickers on the wall. 

“O-shun, we can’t steal another band’s name!” 

“Like you had any better suggestions! You couldn’t think of anyfing! You’d’ve lost us the entire gig! I just saved us, me!”

“Awright, awright.” I rubbed her shoulder and did my best English accent. “Don’t get yah knickahs in a twist.”

“Who even says that?” 

“Chill, okay? Let’s just hope they’re someone nice and obscure. Don’t want us to get sued. So was it this one?” I pointed to the closest thing I could find to a title that looked similar to “Cammy and the Coffee Cats.” I was beginning to lose my initial trepidation, I mean she was dyslexic after all, there probably wasn’t even a band called--

“No, that one.” I followed her finger to the album she seemed to be pointing to. “Obviously!”

“I Wake Up Screaming?” 

“Only at night, never in the morning,” Ocean said helpfully. “Don’t worry I’m used to it from Mum.”

“What? No, that’s the name of the band on the record!”

“No it’s not!” 

“Look! That’s clearly what it says.” I got out the wooden pole with the hook that we use to take down the high up records and showed it to Ocean up close. “See?”

I wasn’t shitting her or anything. “I Wake up Screaming” was written, old school movie style across the album cover like they were done freehand in white paint. The mocha coloured dude in the picture was wearing this wide-legged zoot suit like Jim Carrey in “the Mask.” 

“Let me see! Wot? No, no, I didn’t see that part. Look where it says—“

She pointed further down to more writing on the cover. “King Creole and the Coconuts?” I guessed that was the real name of the band. Too bad ‘cause I thought “I Wake up Screaming” definitely had some “She Wants Revenge” -style flare. 

“Well, uh, with the sticker thingy there this part looked like a C,” she hedged and pointed to the letter ‘K.’ 

“Yeah, it does,” I lied, unconvincingly. Wow, my third wave reading lessons really aren’t making a dent, are they? “Anyone could’ve made that mistake.” 

“Still a good name though, roight?

“Brilliant name.” 

It’s a shit name to tell the truth, (well except for the Cammy part being first and separate from the rest of the band, because that is kind of cool), but what can we do now? Beggars can’t be choosers. At least she didn’t say we called ourselves “U2” or “the Beatles.” The important thing was that King Creole and his Whatever- nuts couldn’t sue us for copyright because it wasn’t the same name. Oh yeah, and playing on stage in front of a bunch of real people. That part was kind of a big deal.


	32. Cammy: I Need You

5\. I Need You

I still haven’t told Ionee about the gig. I know she’ll be pissed I volunteered us without asking her first, but I had to. If I hadn’t we wouldn’ta had a chance. That Darren Walls guy would’ve walked right out the store and found someone else and that’d be it. Sometimes you just have to grab the bull by the horns, right?  
Stupidly, I forgot to ask Darren what he’d be paying us for the gig. I was just too shocked to be asked at all. Where that whole shpiel about Ionee’s new band and how me and Ocean were in it, honestly, I don’t know where it came from. Mitch always said I was good at inventing stuff, improv-ing weird fake stories on the spot when we were young and in need of excuses, words coming outta my mouth as fast as I could think them, uber-confident sounding and utterly bullshit. Sometimes, I swear, I don’t even know half of what’s in me, the things I’d do for something I want this badly…it’s fucking scary.  
But on the bright side, at least he was paying us, he’d made it clear in the e-mail, whatever “the usual rate” meant anyway, and wasn’t expecting us to just do it for exposure or some stupid shit like that, which was a major step in the right direction.   
I swear I fully intended to tell her while hanging out making a massive pot of Kraft Dinner for supper, just the three of us, but then she just started in on me about leaving my bike in the living room and it’s a trip hazard, (I didn’t want it stolen like the other one and there was no more space downstairs, and it was a bike, so it was frickin’ huge, so why wouldn’t anyone see it before they had a chance to trip on it?) And couldn’t I just keep it in the cupboard under the stairs and I said oh? Along with the extra toilet paper and the skeleton of Harry Potter? Which I thought was a pretty hilarious bon mot, but apparently was not according to her, and anyways, there’s no space for it there. To which she said, “ha ha very funny pecause, there was plenty of space down there before you showed up and then all of a sudden, like that”…. (she made a “poof” gesture with her fingers) “it was gone” and it’s a little ironic that she doesn’t know she’s quoting from “the Usual Suspects” or maybe she does and she’s just fucking with me and then we ended up arguing about how much toilet paper I was wasting again, and how I kept blocking the toilet and I had to defend myself pecause it isn’t my fault that the Cottonelle people claimed their wet wipes were flushable, but then they weren’t if you had a dinosaur toilet from the Cenozoic era, which all toilets in England apparently are and blah blah blah.  
She’s just pissed I got Mum and Dad to pay for my new bike, when she told me before I could use her old one.   
“Your bike frame’s too small for me. Not my fault you’re so short.”  
“I’m not short. If humanity ever colonizes Mars they won’t take you because you’re so unnecessarily tall. Why are you so tall? What’s the point to being that tall anyway? A human being doesn’t require that much extra material to function! It’s wasteful.”  
“I guess I’m just a fucking waste of space then.”  
“You know I don’t mean it like that, but it is a waste to get a new bike when the old one is perfectly serviceable.”   
“Says you. The small frame makes me hunch over.”   
“The frame’s not that small! You can lengthen the seat post! Anyway you’re supposed to ride hunched over a little!”  
“Says you.”  
“I just don’t see why you had to hit up Mum and Dad to pay for it. They work hard for their money and it’s shit you don’t need. You said you need it to get to work and that’s not true. You take the tube.”  
“Only sometimes.”  
“Right, your bloomin’ life depends on it.”   
“Ionic bond.” I batted my eyelashes at her.   
“Alberto Camus.”  
“Who even is that?”  
“The Stranger?”  
“I think his name was Albert Camus.”  
“No it wasn’t.”  
“You’re confusing it with that stupid shampoo commercial.”  
“What?”  
“You know those vapid European models posing like idiots going ‘Oooooo Alberto.””  
“Aaaaah! I hate you! I thought that at least got erased. ”   
I shrugged. “Memory’s a fickle bitch.”  
“Like you have to tell me that.”  
“Anyway, I wasn’t lying—it’ll be helpful, having a bike. I’ll shop for groceries and put them in the basket and the pannier bags. Then we don’t have to carry them.”  
“It’s still not the truth, what you told them. You know Mum hates it when we’re ‘sneeeaaaakkky.’”   
She said it in Mom’s patented evil sneaky person voice.   
“Alright, fine, I’ll tell ‘em them you messed up your foot again, and I need the bike to help you do your grocery shopping. How’s that?”   
“It’s not the same!” she complained, clattering together the dirty dishes she was gathering from all over the room in her agitation. “It’s flipping blackmail, that’s wot it is.”  
I shrugged and grabbed a few coffee mugs, trying to ignore the dead flies on the bottom of a few. All this time in London and the lack of mosquitos, wasps and ants has been such a blessing that I didn’t think they had bugs here at all, and now we’ve got some kind of random fruit flie infestation—you leave anything out for even a few hours and they’re all over it. Somehow they seem to have evolved to really like coffee of all things. You gotta watch those fuckers, they mutate like crazy apparently.  
“All the rest are your dishes by the way.”  
“Not all of them—“  
“Hummus and quinoa. Not mine. When you planning on cleaning up?”  
“Mmmm… soon.”  
“You said that yesterday.”  
“Oh come on! It’s not like you washed yours either.”  
“At least mine’re in the sink, not all over the shop like yours. And anyway, whether I clean the dishes or not is my business. It’s my house, you know.”  
“I am paying rent.”  
“Not enough to make me your servant.”  
“So if I paid you that extra hundred quid you’d wear that sexy maid outfit I got for Halloween?”  
“No.”   
“See there—you’re smiling. You know I crack you up.”   
“You’re a twat.”  
“Look, I’ll try to be tidier, a tidier twat, okay?”   
“Wotevah.”  
I wrapped my arms around her, feeling a little guilty and gave her a gentle squeeze. “Poor Ionic Bond, you need more hugs!”   
“Yeah, maybe, Ocean hasn’t been so into cuddles lately.”  
“She’s becoming a teenager. It’s natur—“  
“She thinks I murdered her dad, Cammy.”  
“No, Irons, c’mon she doesn’t think that. And anyway it’s not true.”   
“How do you know? Maybe I’m secretly a sociopath or something?”  
“Bollocks. Would I love you if you were?”  
She just shrugged in my arms, her patented Ionee shrug. It’s things like that I missed, being away from her, those little physical things you forget when your relationship’s just on the phone, the way another person tucks their pants into their socks when they put on their shoes, weird shit like that.   
“C’mon you know I love you. Always have, always will.”  
“Yeah, you too, Camera Club,” she said and squeezed back.   
When she pulled away I felt a slight wetness near my shoulder. I studied her face, but her eyes just look defiant, daring me to call her out. I back off.   
“I’m so glad I’m here, really, like really thankful you let me stay. You don’t know what it’s like back there. Fuck, wherever I went it was like they were still there—Mitch and then Jonah too-- on every corner, every coffeshop, every movie theatre, everywhere we ever went—the whole city reminding me— our house, the backyard, the snow and the trees-- everything. I couldn’t go anywhere without the memories grabbing at me. I’ll never forget that you helped me get away, let me get someplace where I could get a job, be a fucking person y’know?”  
“You were always a person.”  
“No, not there-- I’d apply for all these jobs and it was just like I didn’t even exist, like I was less than nothing. Letting me be here with you—you saved me.”  
“Rubbish, you came here yourself. You got the money together and took the chance. You saved your own self.”  
I’m not so sure about that. Would I have had the courage to come England if I knew once I got here I’d be totally by myself, alone? I could’ve gone to other countries to teach—Japan, Korea, the UAE— I came here. Still playing it safe in my own way.  
“Anyway, you mustn’t take me grumbling a little to mean I don’t want you here, that I don’t appreciate-- Seriously, you’ve really helped me turn things around.”  
It was weird. I wasn’t used to so many compliments at one time from her. I’d hate to ruin the moment by introducing the total lie I told Darren Walls about us being in a band, but she had to know. Just how to spin it to her? In the meantime my mouth ran on just fine on its own, leaving the rest of my brain behind.   
“I missed us just us being together like this, like when I was little. I always feel like I can just, y’know? talk to you, shoot the shit and be at ease. I never have to explain stuff, you just—“  
She smiled a little. “Get it?”  
“Yeah.”  
“I know. Even when you were little, like four years old and I was telling you my problems and you just listened, innit? Even then, I could always talk to you.”   
“You know I was worried about you, back when the riots were on TV and stuff.” I did, I’d imagined this whole crazy drama in my mind when the images first came on the TV: London in the dark, no lights anywhere, people setting fires, throwing bricks at windows. Ionee trying to run from the flames, but always too slow, as the fire rushed towards her... ever since I read this article in the paper about burn survivors I’ve been terrified of fire, above all things. I shivered.  
“Pfffttt! Rubbish!” said the real Ionee, alive and well in front of me. “There were no rioters here. C’mon don’t look so worried, it was ages ago, anyway.”   
I blinked, trying rid myself of the images in my mind. Sometimes, my imagination, it’s so strong, the catastrophes it pictures, like they’re always way too real. I’ve never understood why people go to horror movies. Me, whatever I read or see or hear about that’s even a tiny bit disturbing is somehow stuck in my brain for all eternity, lucky me.   
Somewhere in the back of it all, there’s this part of me still there-- at UCLA Medical Centre, stuck staring down at Ionee lying there, transformed into this weird creature held together by bandages and fixators which are this metal scaffolding that look like Medieval torture devices and all the beepy machines-- her giving me this grotesque, druggy smile and a one handed slow-mo wave and then just passing out. Which is better than other memories of her screaming and barfing over the side of the bed from the pain and the morphine and being right there when she started screaming because Mum told her Sy died and she couldn’t go to the funeral.  
You see something like that and it burns into your brain like a brand. The crazy thing is I know I remember it better than even Ionee does because they had her pumped full of drugs. Sometimes she had dreams she thought were real and real things happened she told me later, she thought were nightmares. As for me, I was just there, watching remembering, sober as a judge. And I know even if I live to a hundred it’ll stay in my memory. It’s just one of those things, like the way Bubie forgets where she put her phone that morning, but still remembers hiding under a park bench during a pogrom.   
“Hey!” Ionee raised an eyebrow at me. “Ground Control to Major Tom.” She blew on a spoonful of KD. “Can you see if the noodles are soft enough?”  
I tasted the noodles. Good, but not truly excellent. Not yet anyway.  
“You think we oughter add another packet of cheese?”   
“What? From another box?” I’ve seen Kraft Dinner made by my Bubie all my life, but never ever with more than one cheese packet. Such a thing, would’ve been blasphemy in her house, where to waste food is a cardinal.  
“It’s not a waste! We’ll figure out something to do with the leftover noodles. It just tastes better if it’s cheesier.”  
“But it feels so wrong.”  
“C’mon Cammy, let’s live dangerously!”   
I added the packet quickly before I could change my mind, feeling invisible Bubie peering angrily over my shoulder, muttering something about starving children in Africa and how we should all be wearing undershirts.   
We went over to the couch and set our bowls down on the coffee table. Ionee leaned back into the cushions with a happy sigh, propped her foot up on a stack of old catalogues and phone books on top of the coffee table and began to eat.  
I looked over at her eating, but I couldn’t touch my food. I had to tell her. It was now or never.   
“What?” she asked, around a mouthful of neon orange noodle. “What’s wrong? You usually just hoover this up.”  
Crap. You fucking coward! Just get it over with. “Ionee?”  
“Yeahr?”  
“What’d you think about us starting a band?”  
“I thought we already did-- you, me and Ocean, innit?”  
“I mean like a real, serious band. Y’know like one that does gigs.”  
“I guess it’d be cool, I mean, we’d have to practice a lot, you know, and I’d need to get back into shape again with my playing. It might take a few years, but with a little time…”  
“But what if we didn’t have any?”  
“Any what?”  
“Time.”  
“Wot? Come again?”   
“I got us a gig!” I blurted out.  
“You got us a—“  
“Gig. Saturday night.”  
The spoon literally dropped from her hand with a plop, right into her bowl.  
“You’re shitting me.”  
“No, no, I’m serious!” I laughed nervously and took a spoonful of KD, waiting for the verdict. It really did taste better with the second packet of cheese powder in it. I couldn’t look up at Ionee. I didn’t want to see her angry, instead I peered intensely down at the tiny little pieces of tubular orange pasta in my bowl with its pattern of Beatrix Potter bunnies running around the rim. Help me guys, please. Whatever Ionee said would mean the life or death of this dream. If Ionee wouldn’t do it, I couldn’t see her letting Ocean do it either. Without the two of them there was no group, just me.  
It was part of what I came to England for, to become a musician, a singer for real. To be in a real band.   
Please, please make Ionee say yes, I prayed. But then I remembered all the other results of stuff I’d prayed for over the years and quit it. 

“Let me sleep on it,” was what she said.   
Okay, okay it wasn’t a “no!”   
And that’s a start.


	33. Ionee: I wake up Screaming

IONEE ISRALS  
(London, UK)

6\. I WAKE UP SCREAMING

I was screaming so loud it took me a few seconds to realize I was really awake, drenched in cold sweat, T-shirt nightgown thingy sticking to me like I’d been dumped in the tub. Wot was it? Where were we?

  
Early morning it looked like, light just star’ing to filter through the curtain, streaks running pink and gold and pale purple across the sky. From below in Willesden Green Station, I heard the whistle of a train and then that Sophie B. Hawkins song flitting through my head, in summer I want to meet you barefoot, barely breathing….As I lay me down to sleep this I pray, that you will hold me dear, though I’m faraway…Sy’s honey voice whispering the words in my ear, sly and sensual, angling for a quick one in the back of our rented van somewhere off the A4 by a field full of yellow flowers.

  
And then I remembered, like a punch in the gut, everything that happened in LA and the panic was back again. I turned to see Cammy, instead of Sy, lying there beside me, dark hair spread out like black wings and I calmed somewhat. I touched her and she was real and she was breathing and wot was reality and wot was dream slotted themselves back into their true places again. True, but not appropriate, some things that really actually happened, still seemed to me so wrong, puzzle pieces that never really fit in the space, pieces that seem to belong to another puzzle entirely that got mixed up with mine, things my subconscious still refuses to believe.

  
And then once everything’s clicked back into place-- The thing I told Cammy. Last night. Wot was I bloody well thinking?

  
Fuuuucccccckkkkkkkk.  
I am NOT READY FOR THIS.

  
No fooking way. Not with Sy’s ghost still rattling round in my head, not with my leg still fucked up, not with Mum and Dad not knowing about any of this, not with Ocean playing in a pub—no no no no I am not okay, not okay with any of it.

  
I shook Cammy by the shoulder. Her eyes looked drugged and bleary. Fucking meds means I’ll have to tell her all this all over again in the morning I know, but I need her to know, to know NOW before I fucking burst…

“Cammy, I’m sorry, but I can’t—the band--I just can’t, alright?”

“Mmmmmph, sleeping,” she mumbled without opening her eyes. “Go back t’shleep.”

I lie awake for an hour, staring out the window. Then I feel a little hand stroking against my shoulder.

“Mummy? Mummy? You awake?”

“Ocean sweetie?”

“I had a bad dream.”

**Author's Note:**

> XXXXXXXX
> 
>  
> 
> I'm putting this out there, because it sort of fits into OUAT fandom, though in a very, very alternate universe sense. I began writing these books in 2014. What started out as a piece of alternate universe OUAT fan fiction involving Mr. Gold as the owner of a punk shop in Camden market quickly morphed into its own distinct thing. If you really squint closely you might be able to see the bones of Gold, Bae, Jefferson and Killian in there in certain physical features and relationships between characters, but its so far from that starting point now, I don't know if thinking of it that way is very helpful. 
> 
> I began working on this series after I sent in a query letter to an agent using the first chapter and the agent showed interest and requested the rest of the novel in March of 2014. I had to admit that I hadn't written anything beyond that. The agent was still interested and requested that I finish up the novel and then send it in once it was complete. I worked on this project for years. Like every other artistic project I've undertaken, it ended up taking much, much, much longer than the time I initially budgeted for it. Periodically, I would send exerts to the agent to make sure she was still interested in the book and to show that I was still actively working on it. In the years between when I submitted that first chapter and today I had two children and completed a master's degree. I have been working part time jobs all through this time as well, which somewhat cut down on my writing time. Last spring, about a month before my daughter was born, I finally submitted the first complete book of the series to the agent. Unfortunately, it was rejected. I really couldn't get a definitive answer why, other than the fact that the main character's voice no longer had appeal. Since then I have submitted it to a number of other agents and publishing companies with no luck. 
> 
> I'm willing to accept that maybe there is just no market out there for this type of material, or that perhaps there IS a market, but the execution is lacking. I have to say I still have so much affection for these characters and their struggles. They are like good friends of mine that I have in the back of my head all the time, yearning to share their lives and the things they've learned with the world. It feels like a disservice to them to just leave them to rot, forgotten in my hard drive. It makes me sad to think of them being buried deeper and deeper below all the newer files through the years. Even if I don't make money out of any of the work I put into them, I feel like Ionee and Co. have personalities and stories that need to be shared. They've kept me company through these years and it feels so unfair to them to frustrate them in their purpose. Cammy, Ionee, Ocean, Jams, Kevin, Sebastian and of course City, are performers first and foremost and were meant to command a stage. I made them to evoke emotion and entertain, I made this story because I had never read anything that really spoke to me about what it's like to be an artist and a mother at the same time and how challenging this is in the modern world both fiscally and personally. I hope you find this story interesting, and if you don't, well just think, you didn't have to spend any money on it! If you have any comments or insights to share with me please don't hesitate to do so. And if you love this story and its characters as I do, pass it on to someone else who'll enjoy it.
> 
> XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX


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